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Tangental Response to (but not really): All those difficulty articles
...Without actually being hard. Such a conundrum, one might say. Appearing
difficult without being hard? Why would that be important at all to having
a good game? Games are either 'easy' or they are 'hard'. Perhaps there is
some flavor inbetween (depending on who is being asked), but people can
clearly tell which is which, right? It's really the actual difficulty of
the game that is important!
And...here you'd be wrong. The hardcore gaming contingent, as hinted at by
Raincrystal, do not move the market and never will. To service them
directly would, as explained in her editorial, drive off and/or frustrate
most the casual gamers and leave what, while fun to a small group, would be
a very narrow focused game behind. So...why not make games easy? Super
easy in fact? Because players will figure it out and it will kill interest.
Nothing shattered the fun of Chrono Cross for me quite as distinctly as
recognizing that I really had no real chance to die, even against supposed
boss enemies. Yes, I know some found it hard at points, but really whether
it was hard or not wasn't very important at all. What was important was the
illusion that it had some manner of difficulty. At no point was it terribly
important that I died (though death is an excellent way of maintaining this
illusion), but that I believed that, at certain key points of the game, that
I had the potential to die if I made the wrong decisions and used a poor
strategy.
Let's just take a moment to let this sink in. The best, most widely
renowned, and beloved of RPGs (and I'd even go as far as to expand that to
all general genres of gaming) are not truly difficult at all but provide the
illusion that they are difficult. They don't toss out xp or power
willy-nilly and make the game super easy the whole way through. That
neither benefits the atmosphere nor shows any respect to the player who is
playing the game. It shatters the illusion of the story being presented in
almost all cases. They instead promote the feeling of that you can lose to
a degree that you feel you must actually put effort and insight into
playing. Some of this may come from a 'natural' leveling curve (and in
fact, contrary to Brad's claims, providing a player with the ability to
level up as a valid strategy is wholly worthwhile, if not always in the
degrees we see commonly), some of it comes from actually dying sometimes
(though that is a wholly unnecessary bit to the experience save to convey
the recognition that one CAN die/lose) and some of it comes from a simple
perpetually misunderstood game design paradigm[1] of how difficulty works.
Anyhow, in that set of best, most widely renowned, and beloved of RPGs,
you'll usually find that this set of options is pretty hefty. Often erring
on too large rather than any sense of 'narrowness'. This, far from being a
detriment to the enjoyment of the game, is in fact part of the reason for
it. Having quite a few good options is generally an aspect of both broad
and deep gameplay and adds to the ability of games to be replayed and still
be fun. But this is contrary to one (if not two) of the main proponents of
difficulty in a game. And I don't think anyone is going to point that
making things ridiculously hard to do once you've decided to do them is a
good thing.
Instead, what is generally done is the creation of an illusion of acceptable
difficulty, which generally comes in two forms: The direct illusion and the
intuitive fakeout (Yes, fanciful names for things that have no technical
name that I'm aware of). They both represent pretty much opposite
philosophies of coming at the same thing (Prempting: Yes, there are
obviously some that don't fall perfectly in this model or do things
differently while still being beloved by and large, but the vast majority
fits into one of the two pretty smoothly).
The first directly attempts to create the illusion as the player perceives
it. What the player is doing is not, in any real fashion, hard, difficult,
or threatening, but the player is made to believe that it is. This
illusion, as a rule, never really holds after the fact, but is generally
easier to build and when well built provides all the excitement one could
want with a full fledged belief that 'yes, you are just about to die'. A
good example of this is Final Fantasy 6. Kefka had oodles of atmosphere.
There was a ton of buildup in both story and battle to present the illusion
that he was a terrifying, powerful, and deadly force. Why, he even lashes
out almost within the first turn or so with 'fallen one' which regardless of
your characters power, knocks their hp to one. Sounds incredibly
challenging, only a hit to kill you after that. The illusion of difficulty
solidly in place.... even though we all know after the fact that kefka is
kind of a pushover and in fact playing him again solidly reveals him as all
smoke and mirrors. But that doesn't detract at all from the important
initial experience (Which is the only one most gamers ever take out of a
game).
The second, instead provides something that is quite challenging but also
leads the player through it utilizing effective and intuitive design
(something remarkably hard to accomplish well) and hides the real challenge
from the player for the most part until they are through, when they then
reflect on it and realize 'wow, that was a really complicated puzzle'. Yes,
the puzzle is usually visible as challenging beforehand, but not quite to
the real level it'd deserve (where it could easily come off as frustratingly
difficult). While I'd say some games subtly achieve this to some degree
(I'd personally count Lufia 2 and Suikoden 2 among them), I really would
have to say the game I've seen that has best developed/personified this
method of retaining the Illusion of difficulty without actually being hard
is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Many of the puzzles in this game
are actually respectably difficult, requiring a precise set of tens to
hundreds of moves in a row between save points combined with usually instant
death on failure. From an obvious point, the whole instant death thing
definitely satisifies creating the belief that you can die and that the
puzzle is difficult/deadly. But at the same time, the slow and carefully
calculated ('natural') progression upwards in complexity combined with a
friendly rewind feature left most, if not all, of the puzzles feeling
intuitive and almost easy to solve, even if on reflection it's quite
noticible that they are pretty complicated endeavors. Rather than pulling
the punches on the blows and belittling the traps, they kept them as deadly
as possible most the time, creating a rather terrific atmosphere of
excitment when going by them.
Anyhow, to summarize and translate into RPG terms: 'the player should feel
he has a chance to die and lose, but shouldn't have to die all the time(or
even at all really) to feel this way. He shouldn't feel that just one(or
two) simple strategies will solve every door, puzzle, and battle, but at the
same time should feel naturally able to find some valid strategy for dealing
with what's in front of him'.
This does not mean that every battle should feel like a life and death
struggle though, just to ward that off. The 'filler' battles in RPGs are
just that. They both provide a bit of life to going through a dungeon
(regardless of it's form) and provide what in action movies is classically
filled by the mooks. It's dramatically unexciting for every battle to
provide this atmosphere (And overkill). Instead, they provide the vision of
the characters as heroes and thus build more excitement when you hit the
actual boss. Using the action movie analogy, you never really expect any of
the 300 or so mooks that pop out of everywhere to really 'harm' the hero or
last through more than a few hits, but instead to simply demonstrate that
'yes, the hero is a badass' (amongst other things). That said, I hope this
explains why it's not that important whether a game is easy or difficult in
truth, but that the best games instead strive for the illusion of difficulty
without truly beng hard.
[1] An explanation on that misunderstood gaming paradigm: a player,
regardless of the game, is always given a certain range of options at any
given point in a game. A certain subset of these options consist of the
valid moves of a game, pretty much always a smaller subset than the original
set. For any given challenge, a certain smaller subset of this subset of
'tactics' is valid. Ideally, you don't want each tactic in this valid
workable set to be equally valid. Instead there should be a set of methods
that work desirably well, one or two that work very well, one or two that'll
be quite tough but work, and generally one or two incredibly obvious ones
that anyone can do. In RPGs, this 'incredibly obvious' one is almost always
just level gaining. It's a valid tactic and one that really shouldn't get
all the whining it does as it effectively serves it's purpose: Pretty much
anyone who can't figure out the other tactics can level gain to continue on.
Why not only use this tactic? Well, Brad hit on it a bit, but didn't
really get that it's not difficulty at all that leads to it. In a well
designed game there's always those other parts of the 'working tactics'
subset that usually have other advantages in choosing them. Quite often the
harder ones lead to a more exciting fight. The easiest one is, in a good
game, usually well hidden, rewarding cleverness and insight either into the
game mechanics or the specific puzzle at hand. In all cases 'difficulty' is
only a measure of how hard it is to recognize this set, the size of the set,
and the difficulty in executing the action chain along that set. This holds
for all games.
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