Here's an interesting thing. I've sat in on a few gaming focus groups and talked to people who've run a bunch more, and there's one result that's more-or-less consistent. Gamers in their mid/low teens are more likely to hate games where the difficulty curve is less than brutal. So they might feel insulted by a fun arcade-style racer complete with power-ups like, say, Need for Speed Nitro, but fall hard for an unforgiving racing simulator like Need for Speed Shift.
The interesting part is this: Gamers in their mid/late teens are more likely to enjoy a Nitro for what a Nitro is, a Shift for what a Shift is, and not especially care that one's built tougher than the other.
Video games are a unique animal. You can't change a movie's rating on the fly to suit your tastes. A game of chess won't get any easier unless you pick a chump to play. And you can't re-write Eminem songs to add extra profanity. But video games put those decisions in your corner - Choose Your Difficulty - and many force the issue right up front, before you're allowed to even start playing. If you're suddenly wondering why that is, the answer's pretty simple. A smart developer knows their game's dead in the water if they don't nail the difficulty.
Forget graphics, forget weapons and puzzles, forget story, forget characters, and forget controls. Difficulty is the single most important element of any game.
The first game I remember giving me options was Tempest, straight from the gold-plated brain of David "Missile Command" Theurer. You could start on any board you wanted, and earn a hefty point bonus if you survived it. That's where the challenge started for me, and games that aren't challenging just aren't fun. At least, not for long. And it's not enough to merely keep that challenge consistent, either. It's got to escalate and evolve as the game progresses, or mindless repetition busts it straight back to boredom town. Not a big issue back in Tempest's coin-op day, when you bought twenty-five cents' worth of game and usually got five, maybe ten minutes out of it. Today's six hour games, nine hour games, twenty hour games are a very different story. If we're not constantly challenged to the limit of our abilities, there's no sense of accomplishment when we win. If there's no sense of accomplishment, there's no sense in playing.
Trouble is, the skill range of players out there runs wide. Used to be anybody could walk up to a random video game - Pac Man, Space Invaders, Arkanoid - and feel comfortable playing it for a bit. Not anymore. Not since Street Fighter II weeded out the weak from the strong with a deep learning curve to master all your fighter's moves... and then to master the animation-breaking combos, which were actually bugs. That's when the majority of quasi-gamers - or "casual gamers," as we call them these days - checked out. After sticking to Tetris and Microsoft Solitaire for decades, it took something as non-threatening as the Wii to really draw them back in.
Every gamer, casual or hardcore, seeks out the level of challenge that appeals to them personally. And now, difficulty is how we judge casual versus hardcore games.
Think about it: most games that don't offer a varying degree of difficulty are indeed casual. The bar is intentionally set low and kept low... too low for us, and that buys casual games and the Wii itself a lot of derision. As those focus groups teach us, there comes a time in everyone's life when they don't feel like eating at the kid's table anymore. You do NOT want to be handing those stone 14-year-olds a Wii Sports clone. They will shred it and spit on its grave.
But if we could toughen up those games at will, turn a casual experience into one that hurts, it would broaden the appeal considerably. We might still not choose a beefed up Ninja Reflex over Infamous, but we probably wouldn't begrudge its existence. Hell, every other game has three difficulty levels minimum just to increase the spread. I'm fairly amazed they don't have more.
It's not because developers aren't obsessing over the subject. Bungie spent sick amounts of cash on a system that tracked their Halo 3 play testers' every movement and mapped exactly where they died on every inch of the campaign battlefields. They spent many, many, many hours analyzing that data, discovering high kill-zones (too difficult) and low kill-zones (too easy), and then reprogrammed huge chunks of the game accordingly to tune the difficulty so it ebbed and flowed exactly the way they wanted it to. Then they went back and did it again, and again, and again, refining, refining, refining.
Feel free to argue the results, but it's tough to argue the intent. Bungie wanted to know precisely were the challenges were so they could control them precisely. And then, knowing they were catering to a tougher crowd, they doubled down on the self abuse with difficulty-increasing skulls for those who didn't want ebb or flow.
DAMMIT!Not all playtesting is as granular as that, and sometimes a perfect balance isn't the goal. Play the Street Fighter game of your choice for a quick education in cheap end-bosses. The guys at Capcom even admit to it now. For some reason, we put up with that crap from Street Fighter. It's expected. It's even demanded. Unless the gameplay's just plain broken, we want that control-throwing frustration.
We want a game that's going to chop us the second we screw around, or just flatten us at its whim... until we finally beat it. They demand more of us, and we rise to the occasion because we're that good. And that feels good. And that's why we game. Too bad almost every game you think of as HARDCORE! these days actually soft-serves the pain. Put another way, they're all too easy.
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