A Rant On Video Game Difficulty

Those of you old enough to do so should think back to the early days of gaming when hardware limitations forced video game developers to make a few difficult choices about the games they wanted to create. Try to think of it from the perspective of someone using that old technology to create a game that people would find entertaining and rewarding. When it came to length there was only so much a developer could to do keep the player interested, to drive them to reach the game's conclusion and to enjoy the time they spent doing it. One of the ways they did this was make their games infuriatingly difficult.

There was a few different kinds of difficult back then. A game back then could have been difficult because of scripted events designed to work against the player and without warning. It also could have been difficult because it took basic and seemingly simple tasks and multiplied them over and over until it was too much for any person to bear. There were even times when was difficult because it was flawed. But looking back then to the early days of gaming and looking to the present, just what has changed about the difficulty level of video games?

I think part of the equation here is expectation. Modern games are pushing for more and more realism, and with that push comes a tricky balancing act of weighing gameplay and entertainment against that realism. When one plays a realistic game they begin to have certain expectations about how difficult it may or may not be. If the game you're playing is capable of killing you instantly and without warning then certain steps must be taken in order to minimize the frustration of playing that game. Checkpoints might be in order, or perhaps a quick save option would be the best method.

Yet such attempts to make the difficulty bearable can be somewhat detrimental to the overall feel and pace of the game. It can be quite exilirating to be doing very well in a game that could kill you in moment's notice, to get pretty far in a given level and to feel confident that you can go further, only to be brought down by an enemy you couldn't see or a threat you couldn't detect. Loading back at the last checkpoint or save completely ruins the atmosphere, erases all of your hard-earned progress and tells you to start over. And yet, sometimes this approach is very, very successful.

Take the old Contra games for example, titles that were ruthlessly out to kill the player at every turn with scripted events and inconvenient enemy spawns. These games were punishing and violent affairs yet their popularity was high and for some without equal. They could be maddeningly difficult and still draw an audience.

Now look at a game like Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, specifically the story mode. Playing on the realistic can be an exercise of dealing with pure madness. You could be killed at any moment by an enemy you did not know was there, and there were plenty of scripted moments designed to shock and confuse you that could be just as fatal. Like Contra this game is out to get you, but unlike Contra this game doesn't seem a very good job of keeping you interested in finishing. Because every time you die you go to the last checkpoint, and if you were just footsteps away from the next one when you were brought down it didn't matter -- you had to do it all over again and you had to listen to all the scripted events every time you did.

This is a huge problem, but it's been dealt with before. Contra awarded you with extra lives. Took a bullet from a baddy you didn't see right away? No problem! You'd spawn a moment later in real time, enjoy a brief period of invulnerability to help you orient yourself, and you could trudge along again in a moment. No such feature in Rainbow Six. Once you died you were dead, and this was done in the name of realism. But just how fun is it be forced to start over completely?

Games like Prince of Persia never had to worry about this. If you make a wrong turn or took a particularly nasty fall on a particularly craggy hill you could simply rewind time and try it over again. A game like this is simply begging to be finished to tell it's story but that doesn't seem to be detrimental at all. If the threat of death is an inconvenience so minor that it can be taken back with the push of the button where does the fear of failure come from?

That's it for now. I'll rant some more later.

impressive rant

dude, I totally understand and agree with you on this. I tried to play starfox again on an emulator and my god, I can't believe I was able to beat that game before. I can barely make it past the first level now.

edit: oh yea, with starfox you only had like 5 lives or so (can't remember) and once they were all gone, you had to start back at the beginning if you wanted to try again so it forced you to play better in order to beat the game. Like you said in the post, games nowadays have quicksaves and checkpoints for when times like these comes so all that mattered was that you got past that point only once, but with games like starfox, it forced you to either play better and learn from your experiences or you don't win the game.

same here when i was 8 or so i beat earth worm jim and beat it alot ten years later played it again and now cant get past the third level but that is what made the old games good. because they seem simple enough then you play it and boom raped lives gone and epic fail.

It was a pretty well established argument, and I found a lot of it highly agreeable. The aspect of a quick save feature intrigues me, and I wish it was more prevalent in games. My favorite aspect of Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter was just that, at almost any time you could quit and create a temporary save file, which would be erased upon loading. It's not an aspect that necessarily gives or takes from the game itself, but I feel like it's a favor for the player.
Also, I thought this might be relevant to your interests:
[web]http://www.greatgamesexperiment.com/game/BananaNababa[/web]
An excellent indie game entitled Banana Nababa modeled after the spirit of difficult 8 bit games.

Tried to clear Gradius 3 for the SNES last month and cleared it without any problems. When I was in elementary school, I even can't past the 5th level. It really forces you to train your reflexes.

Retro games rock XD

I remember beating Mega Man 1 when i was 6-7 years old like it was nothing, like a month ago i downloaded it to the Wii and goddamn, i got game over on the first world (Ice Man's) i tried lol.

There's always IWBTG as well.

I would like to add that in some games, specifically RPGs, there is a 'fake' increase in difficulty. These usually just have enemies with increased statistics, but no change in enemy tactics nor does it require changes in your tactics. In RPGs, it's usually just a matter of level grinding. Almost all really old RPGs fall into having a 'fake' difficulty.

Back to post a little more.

One of the things that has always struck me about a game's difficulty is the choices made by the people who created them. At some point the team of people behind the game's creation had to sit down and decide just how difficult their game would be. In what ways could they limit the player but still keep their interest? How could their decisions affect the project leader's vision of the final product? Is their game going to be actively trying to kill the player at every turn or does it want the player to progress briskly to show them everything the team wanted to see?

Imagine the early Mega Man games and how they were designed. In Mega Man X you went through a simple opening level that served as a kind of introduction to the player in both mechanics and the game's plot (yes, Mega Man has a plot!). After beating a simple boss you were free to choose your next destination and the boss that controlled it. But just how much thought went into this aspect of the game and how did difficulty play a factor?

Clever players soon realized that after acquiring the special weapon from one boss fighting another boss with that weapon made the encounter much, much simpler. Experienced players knew this right out of the gate and it was merely a question of discovering which boss could be beaten the easiest without any special weapons and then which boss to use that weapon on. But interestingly this was optional; you were free to fight any boss you wanted with or without these special weapons. In this instance the difficulty level is largely in the player's hands and not just be selecting easy, normal or hard mode before starting the game. If a player wanted a challenge they could try to defeat Sting Chameleon or Boomer Kuwanger without the weapons that made the encounter simpler. Beating the game efficiently took some trial and error, and because the boss fights were more difficult if you weren't prepared the replay value was high.

This was all done deliberately, of course. Allowing the player to choose their foe gave them the power of choice and forced them to deal with the consequences of that choice. And after defeating each of the bosses in the game it wasn't over, not until you took on the man himself, Sigma, which was a difficult fight indeed.

Giving players choice and rewarding and punishing them accordingly is an interesting game mechanic.

I really miss the difficulty of old school games, nowadays I don't even bother with any setting but hard, the others are just a waste of time.

I can understand in an rpg how there may be a need for a mass of savepoints, as going through large story progressing cut scenes/dialogue multiple times can be very annoying when there is no skip function. Actually, it can be annoying anyway. But in an action side-scroller, having a set amount of continues is perfect. I love Megaman Zero 1-4 even though I spent hours on each level just so I could get S-class in each game. I had to memorize each level as well as enemy positions, my speed in conjunction to their position, the fastest way to get everything and get to the boss in under 2.5 minutes and so on. It was very rewarding at the end.

To be honest, games are directed at the casual gamer market now (damn you casual gamers!) and the hardcore market has been more or less left in the dust. It's sad and depressing which is why I am going to school for game design, so I might have a chance to make a game that is actually hard and will make casual gamers want to cry.