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[Razz]

Honest question.

How would somebody go about making a difficult game fun? Are there certain things you should take into consideration when doing so?

Personally, from my experience, good level design helps a lot. Making your locations interesting and fun to navigate can make even the hardest challenges feel worth it. Music and ambiance helps a lot too (See: Super Metroid)

I'm curious to see what you guys think, though.

[PowRTocH]

I don't think atmosphere or immersion are really helpful in highly difficult games because you get 'pulled out' of the game too often to be truly immersed. I haven't played a difficult game that has kept me interested through immersion.

The only way I've seen hard games really 'click' is when they have very fun, deep gameplay. There's really no way of getting around that. Lots of possibilities and hands on tactile enjoyment seem to do it for me.

However since you mentioned atmosphere and I mentioned kinetics sort of I guess you could say that anything that keeps you 'in the moment', not looking at the difficulty as a cockblock seems to be best, if you're not wanting to make an overtly masochistic game (which do have their audience).

[Chris Whitman]

Hm, I can think of counterexamples to both of those, I think.

VVVVVV has very simple gameplay, but manages to be fun while also being extremely difficult (in fact, the harder it gets, the more fun it is).

Demon's Souls is both extremely difficult and very immersive, with actually a rather detailed plot that seems maybe even deeper than it is, since it isn't forced down your throat.

VVVVVV helps ease frustration by dealing out very little in the way of punishment, but Demon's Souls can be very punishing (as can, say, L'Abbaye des Morts), and that doesn't seem to hurt it particularly.

I think a big component of both these games is that the controls feel very natural, and the goals and conditions for failure are very clear. So when you do fail, it gives you a clear idea of what your problem was and what you can do better next time. That lets you build the skills required to complete the game in a clear and straightforward manner. I think a good indicator is, despite the difficulty, does the player tend to get further on each attempt?

[Razz]

I don't think atmosphere or immersion are really helpful in highly difficult games because you get 'pulled out' of the game too often to be truly immersed. I haven't played a difficult game that has kept me interested through immersion.

I don't entirely agree. The way I see it, the more interesting the game looks, the more the player will want to go out of his way to get to the next location. Atmosphere can help a lot with this; For example, some of the best Knytt Stories levels are the really hard ones, yet they also manage to feel immersive.

And I guess the same could be said about level design; the more interesting it is, the more the player will want to see what the designer had in store next.

I think a good indicator is, despite the difficulty, does the player tend to get further on each attempt?

That's actually a really good way to put it! As you said, a lot of really hard games give clear indications as to why you screwed up. If you die, it's your fault, end of story. That probably helps a lot when trying to make the player learn from their mistakes.

[s0]

I don't think atmosphere or immersion are really helpful in highly difficult games because you get 'pulled out' of the game too often to be truly immersed.

Demon's Souls says otherwise. I felt the dark, dismal atmosphere perfectly reflected the difficulty of that game. I mean, it's basically set in a world in the middle of the apocalypse where most humans are either dead or possessed by demons, so it makes sense that the odds would be against the player.

Anyway, if you make a hard game fun, make it fair! Don't try to fuck the player over with randomness and cheap design tactics. Make them feels like it's their fault that they failed, not the game's.

Also, think of appropriate punishments for failure.  Players get more invested in a game when more is at stake but overly frustrating them will make them give up at some point. On the other hand if are no real ramifications, the game is in danger of becoming a bit mindless (VVVVVV had this problem in some parts for me).

[Pineapple]

The difference between an enjoyably difficult or challenging game and a frustratingly hard one is that the fun one

1) Doesn't mock you in any way or severely punish you for dying/otherwise losing
2) The task's difficulty is not due in any way to poor game design (platforming in a game with terrible controls, finding some small object in a game with illegible graphics)
3) The difficult activity is not an unpleasant or mundane one in the first place. Though these games have their place (IWBTG is a popular example) I personally gave up before I got past the first screen.
4) Extremely precise timing sucks if it's not because you're going fast, and otherwise seemingly pointless increases difficulty gets old fast.
5) Rewards the player with more than mere "progress". There needs to be some kind of motivation to keep going for those who aren't OCD - even the attractive graphics like in Knytt satisfy this point.
6) High difficulty at the very beginning of a game drives the player away. The difficulty needs to be a gentle slope, starting at the difficulty of something like a casual game.

[SirNiko]

"Hard" should be mitigated by experience - as the player plays, they should find themselves getting comfortable with mechanics, timing, situations. A lot of the satisfaction I get from beating a hard game is the knowledge that when I go back it isn't as hard the second time through. There was a point when I didn't think that I could ever beat Metroid: Zero Mission with the 15% item limit, but after playing through a few times on other difficulties I eventually got skilled enough to handle it.

IWBTG showcases both positive and negative points of difficulty. The positive is that the game has so much tremendous variety in it, that you're compelled to press on just to see what lies beyond the next screen. The negative is that the player is left repeating long segments of relatively uninteresting jumps because every time you try and fail to discover how to pass the next obstacle, you're sent back to the beginning of the screen.

Also, nobody has mentioned yet the importance of player experience. What defines "Hard" to me is completely different than what defines hard to, say, my grandmother. How difficult, how precise the timing, how long between save points is different depending on which person you're targeting. So, I think it's important to define a target market for a game, and tailor "Hard" differently for each player.

[gimymblert]

Fair and readable chaos with small deviation for radical new situation, gameplay that favor adaptation through push your risk and safe planning.

As long the player feel likes it's him failing and not the game. He need to fail differently by trying different approach (letting him know that he has some freedom) or by repeating the same strategy, (letting him now that skills count too).

Hey! that's ninja gaiden!

[Ego_Shiner]

make you feel like the baddest of asses when you conquer a seemingly unbeatable challenge
(viewtiful joe, contra, ridley in every metroid game)

[mirosurabu]

I played Bit Trip Runner and while that's not perfectly good example (because some of the earlier levels are just annoyingly difficult but not fun) some of the later levels are good examples of how you should keep players replaying annoyingly difficult levels.

Some of the later levels are very long and annoyingly difficult until you learn them in detail after so many replays. There are no real checkpoints. You always start the level from the very start.

What justifies that is varied SFX and BGM that is building and thus revealing as you play the level. That's what makes Bit Trip Runner fun.

SFX is made out of randomly chosen notes from the same harmonic scale. So when you collect a gold you hear a random note, but since the harmonic scale is the same, you don't get to hear accidentals, and because of that you have an impression of playing varied music as you play the level.

BGM is a repetitive electronic tune that builds layers of melodies when you collect new "pink plus" collectibles. It starts off with one or two layers, builds to a climax and then releases at the end of the level. Each world has two different BGM's that are used throughout levels.

[oyog]

Some people enjoy playing a difficult game, some don't.  My friends and I played punishment for almost two hours while we were drunk.  It was infuriating but it was a hell of a lot of fun.

Personally, I find most JRPGs too difficult because I don't have the patience to stick around in one location leveling up and just want to play through the story.  Eventually I get to a point where I'm at a boss and simply can't get any further without leveling up for a while.  It's at that point I lose interest (or in the case of FFVII, the next disk wouldn't read  ).  I still enjoyed the few that I played, though admittedly I never finished any of them.

In the hypothetical situation where I would play a pirated game (which I wouldn't  ) I would enjoy playing Gradius III for days using save states but if I played on a real Super Nintendo I'd barely make it to the first boss and then I'd have died so many times I wouldn't have any power ups.  That's not to say I wouldn't enjoy playing Gradius without save states but I probably wouldn't play for nearly as long.

On the other hand, to use another cactus game as an example, there are games that are ABSOLUTELY INFURIATINGLY addicting.  Psychomondium.  I played that game over and over.  I realized I wasn't even enjoying guiding that FUCKING BEE through that spiky fucking hallway and yet I would do it over and over.  Hell, thinking about it has me so worked up I can't remember the point I was making.

Oh yeah.  Fun.  I didn't have a whole lot of fun playing Psychomondium but I did anyway.  Over and over, till I beat it.  For me, there's a difference between fun and not-fun-but-still-addicting and I have no idea where to make the distinction.

Atmosphere is certainly part of what makes any game enjoyable for me.  I doubt I would have played through Silent Hill 1 and 2 if it weren't for the fantastic atmosphere.  Hell, those games are almost all atmosphere and very little else.  Granted I played both of those on easy at the time, so they don't really count, but my opinions on a games atmosphere still stand.

[Contrary]

I don't see what the problem is. For me, the difficulty is finding fun in easy games. Difficulty is the main reason I never finished Bioshock or Valkyria Chronicles.

Randomness is probably not the way to go with hard games, at least randomness that you don't have fair warning of and a way to combat it.

[iffi]

I've always hated IWBTG because I always get the feeling that it was made to be difficult first, and that adding some sort of fun to it was almost an afterthought. Without its difficulty, there really wouldn't be too much to it. That doesn't mean I don't like difficult games - I played and enjoyed the VVVVVV demo, and often play Touhou games, among other bullet hells - but I hate it when difficulty is used in place of making the game legitimately fun. In my view, a good hard game should still be fun even if you take away its difficulty (by that I don't mean make it too easy - that's a different problem altogether). For example, I enjoy playing Touhou, even on Easy difficulty.

One of the key things to keep in mind to make a hard game fun is to avoid using Fake Difficulty. Back when I played N years ago, I realized that you could easily make a level (or a game) ridiculously difficult, but what separates the good difficulty from the bad is that a good one doesn't make players feel as if the designer is simply screwing around with them - it feels like an honest and possible challenge. This is what, in my opinion, separates something like

from

, both of which are difficult Cave Story mods. I enjoyed playing BoostMania EX, despite its difficulty, because its sense of "level design" does not consist of placing instant-death spikes on every place imaginable. Rather, it feels like a difficult, but fair, challenge.

[Seth]

I'm usually glad when I play a game like Space Funeral and find it to be very easy.  I definitely was playing that game for the unique atmosphere characters and areas, etc.  I don't think I would have played it very much if it was too difficult, but maybe that's just because it used the tired FF6 battle system.  If it had somehow made a challenging but fun battle system then maybe I could see myself playing through it, but I think it's important that the difficulty of certain types of games doesn't slow the pace too much.

[Absurdist]

From every review I've read, Demon's Souls gets away with being difficult by being fair - every death is "the player's fault."

[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.

[Razz]

You mean like a SM64 master quest? That sounds awesome

[PowRTocH]

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.

[gimymblert]

Oh and that thread, fun mechanics!

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