High Horse is a rotating opinion column in which
GamesRadar editors and guest writers are invited to express their
personal thoughts on games, the people who play them and the industry at
large.
When I was younger, game difficulty barely factored into my
consciousness: I acknowledged that certain games were harder than
others, but I didn’t complain about it. I beat my head against the last
level of Ninja Gaiden II on the NES repeatedly until I won, and I cursed
and stomped around my room, but it never occurred to me the state of
affairs could be a problem with the game. Older gamers may sound like
we’re calling newer gamers coddled when we talk about the old days, but
I’m glad that games have gotten easier and offered more difficulty
levels. As a kid, I had all the time in the world to die over and over;
as an adult, I need more fun and less frustration in my
much-more-limited free time.
However. I’ve found my niche: that of an experienced gamer
who’s good enough to enjoy a challenge, but not so amazing at games that
I can crank difficulty up to the hardest level like it ain’t no thing.
From that perspective, game difficulty is showing increasing problems.
At the core of the issue are some basic assumptions of what “Normal”
and “Hard” are. In the old days, Normal was what you played until you
got good enough at a game until you could tackle Hard mode (something
which I almost never attempted back then). Nowadays, Normal in many
games has edged closer to what Easy mode would have been 20 years ago.
Hard is now the equivalent of Normal. The solution to this should be
obvious: just crank it to Hard on every game.
Unfortunately,
developers seem to be approaching the actual difficulty balance within
Hard mode like they did in yesteryear: they don’t worry if it’s pitched
just right, because if you choose Hard mode, you “kind of deserve
whatever you get.” That mentality was fine in the past, but now that
Hard is the only option for a decent challenge, it means that I can
almost
never find a reasonable sweet spot for my own skill
level. Here’s an example: in Gears of War 2, the difficulty levels have
descriptions to guide you. Easy mode says (I’m paraphrasing) “You’re new
to shooters.” Normal mode says “You have experience with shooters” and
Hard says “You know how to pull off a headshot.” I thought “Hey, I know
how to do headshots!” And off I went.
The game’s challenge was perfect for much of the story, but a number
of times, I hit difficulty spikes that went from challenging to
ludicrous. I’d get through most areas without dying, and then suddenly a
random room would kill me 20 times in a row. Sure, I “deserved what I
got,” but if I’d played Normal mode, the game would have been horribly
boring, considering most of Hard mode wasn’t even particularly
challenging.
Similarly, when I played the original Infamous on
Hard mode, I had no problem tackling the entire game… until I got to the
final boss. Suddenly, the difficulty spiked to 10 times greater than
anything else in the game, and I tried to kill that jerk like 30 to 40
times before giving up in disgust. When Infamous 2 came around, I wanted
to play through a complete story, so I shamefully turned Infamous down
to Normal – and the last boss became a joke. That’s the only time I’ve
ever reduced the difficulty of a game, and it still bothers me, as
though I never truly beat it.
This trend worries me, because it feels like even developers of
“hardcore” games are abandoning the notion that games are even games
anymore. If there’s no actual challenge, then you’re just playing a
vaguely interactive movie. If games all trend toward an easy-ass Normal
mode and totally unbalanced Hard modes, where are gamers like me left?
On
the other end of the spectrum, we have games that err on the side of
too much difficulty without bothering to balance for tight controls or
fair enemies. Again, it’s like the attitude of “you deserve what you
get,” except that in this case, the games offer no easier options.
Recently, I knocked the score down on BloodRayne: Betrayal, War of the
Worlds, and Choplifter HD, due to their sloppy approaches to difficulty –
each one had clunky controls combined with level design that called for
pinpoint accuracy.
I had no problems with these games as concepts. If a dev wants to make a
super-difficult old-school game, more power to them. However, they need
to give players the proper tools for the job – for instance, I liked
Hard Corps: Uprising, because it had great controls and an RPG system
that let you beat it slowly, through attrition. Super Meat Boy had some
of the most precise platforming controls ever, and it also didn’t punish
you too much for failure, always respawning you super-quickly, and
never far from your goal.
I know I’m not alone when I stare at the start screen and wonder, “If I
choose Normal, I’ll be vaguely bored, but if I choose Hard, will I be
screaming later?” Now more than ever, devs need to carefully balance
difficulty, precisely
because the gaming sphere is so much
bigger. The range of skill levels is broader than ever. Games these days
don’t need a million difficulty levels, just slightly expanded ones:
devs only need to carefully balance Normal and Hard modes, and then
leave Easy and Insane as the “you deserve what you get” options. There
are exceptions: games like Dark Souls and Kirby’s Epic Yarn can still
sit in their bookends at either end of the spectrum. But for most games,
devs should focus on balancing their games for both “casual” and the
“semi-hardcore” – those of us currently left hanging out to dry.
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