Lying can be good, but it's not always appropriate and players realizing they were lied to can sour the experience, even retroactively. So it's still a technique that should be used with care, and probably is at it's most effective at the very beginning of the experience.
And here I was thinking that I fall back on old strategy games so often because I'm just a nostalgic old fart. Now I'm wondering if it's because TBS nowadays, though on the surface is providing me a bit of mind crack, is causing my brain to rebel on some level to the saccharine "you're amazing" message they're trying to feed me by manipulating the odds.
Not only that, but when players become more savvy, they'll likely stop actually thinking of certain situations as "natural" (essentially the Game Dev who cried low health). If you realize a BUNCH of games you play use "gradient health", you'll just start taking that into account, inevitably meaning when your playing a game and manage to SQUEAK out a win on a game where the bar is accurate, meaning it was a genuine life or death situation, you might just go "10%? Eh, prob was more 30-40% anyway." And I heard that gears of war along with "low clip magic bullets", also made it so new Multiplayers were actually given a bonus to kill easier, imagine if you knew that's how it worked in a MP match, suddenly the "how did that kill me?" has an answer other then "your bad that's how" which is "noob damage bonus" and I guarantee you 99% of players will blame the latter 99% of the time.
@@murasaki848 They were lying to you back then as well. What the video is talking about isn't anything new like he said with arcade games. Devs today are just much better at hiding it despite games were they obviously aren't.
Okay, granted, I just found this video and I don't have the time to currently watch this, but the comments are kinda flux and I saw this one and wanted to leave a response. But if you think you need to lie, then why not just fix the system so it doesn't need to fake it to make it essentially? Alright, I can imagine not fixing the numbers on say a roll to hit, or whatever, but outside of genuine player misconception of say chances/odds, I can't imagine a time when iterating on the system you're lying in wouldn't result in a 'fairer' system. Like one of the comments here talking about balatro, I haven't played it, but says its truly random, i.e doesn't tweak the odds, I think thats fine, but if there was a reason to 'fix' the system, then just add a caveat that after so many hands it the effect or whatever triggers for sure, and spice it up by increasing the odds as you get closer to that promised trigger if you really want or don't and make sure the player doesn't get lucky breaks? Anyways I guess I want to know what other people think and or if the video goes into detail on this specific field of the topic (idea of iterating the idea to play more fair from the player's perspective while still staying accurate)
This exact thing happened to my dad. He's always loved the Civilization games, and played them a fair bit. He had gotten to the point he was trying the hardest difficulty on Civ 2 or 3, but he quit, as one of his computer opponents rolled out a tank extremely early in the game. Once he knew the AI just cheated, he stopped enjoying those harder difficulties, as it was no longer a fair contest. I feel the same way in games like Stellaris, I don't mind a challenge, but when your AI opponents literally just cheat it can start to feel unfair.
@@bemusedalligator If one person is climbing a staircase while another is teleporting to the top it no longer is a set challenge. It now is about beating the AI no matter what it does, which can be fun for some and annoying to another.
@@bemusedalligator It is very different. If you can't trust what you see, then all your strategies and tactics become meaningless. Why try to reduce the enemy's production if they can just spawn in units? Why try to be first in a race if the moment you're first the other racers get specific attacks that target the first racer? It makes every choice you've made meaningless, and I get enough of that in real life, thank you very much.
@@arkturhellsing1484 It just means, even if you got gud, you still need to git gudder. A tank is not going to roll out "extremely early" in the game -- the A.I. will move through the tech tree swiftly, but not *that* swiftly. Sounds to me like "extremely early" in this case just means faster than the OP's dad could get there.
@@metholuscaedes6794 The dev has confirmed that he doesn't balance any random chance mechanics in the game because he believes it shines its brightest in the hands of true randomness
I think there's a seed factor where the overall odds *are* one in four; but they're really distributed more heavily in one session than in others; to give more the sensation that you're really lucky or really unlucky; which are both significantly more "interesting" and engaging to the player experience than a simple per-use basis. Like, what if it's one out of two seeds that gives you a one out of two chance (this is the 25% it alludes to), and the OTHER seeds give you a one out of ten instead?
I forget which game it was, but there was a situation where I died repeatedly, and then the difficulty plummeted. I don’t think there was anything more demoralizing than that situation. Catching a game in its lie can be misery but not realizing the game is lying can really sell exhilaration to the player.
In Amnesia: The Dark Descent, if you die repeatedly to an enemy the enemy will stop showing up. You can just *feel* the patronizing hand of the developer patting you on the head and saying, "We know you're incompetent, but we'd like you to see the rest of the game, so..."
I remember when I first played RE4 and I died in the infamous water room to the point where it removed the crossbow ganados on the overhead balconies. I was so insulted by this that I immediately reset my game and tried again until I got it.
Here's the thing. The moment I catch a game lying to me about information I need to make decisions is the moment I start referencing the wiki instead of trusting the game.
Yup and when I HAVE to go to an external source to get anything functional out of the game, that's bad design... mind you, I'm a guide follower in general because too many games, too little time in my life. The difference is when the game FORCES it because of unclear or inaccurate information
@@e-man7418 The dice rolls in BG3 ARE actually random unless you turn on the specific feature in the settings to make them less random, which I think the vast vast majority of players turned off.
This is actually a huge issue with D&D. Lots of DMs will cheat, thinking the game will be better if they bend the rules and push for whatever outcome they want. Everyone thinks they're very subtle when they do it and it makes me unable to enjoy the game every time.
Rubber banding in racing games doesn't make the race feel more thrilling to me, it just feels like the ai is cheating and makes me enjoy the genre less.
The big issue there is how obvious and well known it is. It isn't a deception. You aren't deceived. Telling your girlfriend that a dress doesn't make her look fat only works if she doesn't know you think she looks fat.
Agreed. I despise deceptive and cheat-like mechanics that artificially manufacture tension. If a game can't create tension organically, then it is poorly designed (in that area).
There are only 2 ways to balance racing games: 1 realisti where all cars have their fixed performace 2Arcade where the AI is cheating jast to catch up with players or wait for the slow ones. Its not surprising the realistic one is used in sim games.
I think any sort of "behind the scenes difficulty adjustments" should be opt-in / opt-out. I'm the kind of moron that will gleefully throw myself against a brick wall over and over to try to break it down, and I'd be unbelievably upset if I found out that, in-between sessions of leaping face-first into said wall, someone replaced the bricks with cardboard, robbing me of the feeling of satisfaction that would normally come with clearing such a hurdle. To give an example: I've done a level 1 playthrough of Elden Ring, and forcing myself to find solutions to extremely tough problems was very rewarding to me. New strategies to employ, weaknesses to exploit, loadouts to make use of, etc... it all felt really dang good. If I had then been told that "oh, we made the fights a bit easier for you since you seemed to be dying a lot," I'd feel cheated out of a victory that I'd worked very hard to achieve.
Here's what happens if you give player the option. They turn it off, get completely bodied, get frustrated because of a bad experience, and then turn it back on, and then feel patronized because they know the helping hand is on. Part of a game developers job is to protect the players from themselves. Because like he said in the videos, gamers, including him, are idiots. Plus, you're sort of describing difficulty levels.
But consider this: Is the problem not that the game secretly assisted you, but that it was caught doing so? If you found out right now that Elden ring had indeed done that, you'd be presumably upset. But if you never found out, you'd feel just as good as if you'd done it legitimately. Perhaps you'd even feel better with the assist if you thought your skill was higher than it really is. It's just a thought experiment. Obviously, implementing secret assists that are easily spotted is the worst case and the problem most people have with this.
You could also adjust your goals to be more like "I want to see how far I can get without dying". Shmups like Raiden and Gradius adjust difficulty based on how well you're doing and how many power-ups you have, but scale it back down when you die even at the highest difficulties because if you lose your power-ups, you certainly can't be expected to survive what it's throwing at you WITHOUT that extra firepower. The way players have adjusted to this over the years is doing 1cc or no-hit runs, which will naturally max out the difficulty in the systems as designed by the devs. In the fringe cases where people find a game too easy or dislike having mechanics that help them when they struggle, the best response may simply be to "git gud" and self-impose challenges for your exceptional skill. The devs can absolutely add things to make it harder (Hades is a masterclass in difficulty, ij my opinion) but it wouldn't hurt to develop the skill of finding your own fun.
I've noticed that happening in games before because I'll sometimes mess around with a boss a couple times, not expecting to win, just to get a feel for it or have some fun. Maybe I'll just see how long I can survive without attacking as I get used to avoiding and learning the attacks. Or maybe I try to fight the boss with some kind of joke weapon. And then when I've had my fill and fight it for real, it's hilariously easy because the game thinks I'm incompetent.
@@straysheep4467 But in shmups dynamic difficulty is part of the game loop: you're expected to start from scratch over and over, so it adjusts across a single run and resets for the next one. It's done specifically to push you to the 1cc, even if players think they're attempting it out of their own volition. Now imagine if failing hard at one run made the next one easier and you got a cheap 1cc: you'd feel cheated if you noticed. Well, that's what happens in longer games that silently adjust difficulty on game over.
In my personal experience, there's a big downside to this "lie" if a player finds out about the lie. If the player realizes that the game has an invisible helping hand to aid the player, it can make them doubt whether any achievement is properly earned or not. This can lead to said player discrediting themselves for any achievement in the game, feeling hollow victory, and forcing themselves to crank up the difficulty way above what's usually comfortable for them, just to "compensate for the game's invisible helping hand" Once they do, it can lead to player frustration or even worse, outright quitting the game. It's a tough thing to balance, and I'm sure that the benefit greatly outweighs the downside, but the downside still exists nonetheless, at least from my personal experience.
For sure. Just like any aspect of a game if you get it wrong the consequences can be severe, and it's always important to keep that in mind and not rely too heavily on established conventions.
Yep, the moment you notice the trickery, nothing feels earned or fair anymore. Success feels like it was handed to you for doing poorly, failure seems like an unfair punishment for doing too well, all player agency is lost in all outcomes. Which is why I think that automatically adjusting difficulty should ALWAYS be optional.
The type of lie matters a lot to me. If it's just framing and not a mechanical difference, like the gradated health bars, I don't mind too much. It can be annoying if you're trying to work out something technical and precise, but it's not usually a big issue for normal play. But the things that change the difficulty of the game really just kill it for me.
The rubber banding in racing games, whether it works 'for' or 'against' the player is a good example because it is so obvious. The moment I see that I lose interest.
I usually don't like leaving YT comments since the comment section isn't a fertile ground for discussion, but this notion of developers lying to players REALLY gets my knickers in a twist, so here we go. As I see it, there are two separate ideas contained in this video: Fake Choices, and Curated Conditions. *Fake Choices:* This is when a game presents you with a seemingly meaningful choice, but in reality the outcomes are more limited that you would otherwise believe. Most commonly seen in dialogue where NPC's will use a single reply for multiple distinct dialogue choices. Referred to as "Divergences" at 7:07 (if I'm understanding correctly anyway). *Curated Experiences:* This is when a game secretly manipulates information and mechanics to produce a desired experience in the player. Enemy AI being subtly made easier to help a struggling player is the obvious example. These are similar things that usually go hand in hand, but not always. The example of NPC's using the same dialogue to respond to multiple seemingly unique dialogue options is an example of Fake Choices being used to produce a Curated Experience. That Curated Experience being a natural feeling conversation with an NPC. However, the example of Enemy AI getting easier to help a struggling player doesn't present any Fake Choice. It is simply the game reacting to the players actions and reacting as programmed. Basically, Fake Choice is always in the purpose of a Curated Experience, but you can have Curated Experiences without Fake Choices. *On fake choices:* Games are a medium entirely based on player choice and agency. The outcome of the simplest game, Pong, is decided by the players inputs and decision making (and probably some RNG, but that isn't relevant). This is the primary (and unique!) selling point of games compared to other forms of entertainment. If Pong reflected the ball back at your opponent no matter where your "bat(?)" was, then why would you bother playing? You'd be having no real impact, no real say in the events unfolding. You'd be a passive observer fooled into thinking they're an active participant. Fake Choices undercut the selling point and (for lack of a better word) heart of games; Interactivity. When unnoticed they give an illusion of depth, wide spanning content, and replayability, but when noticed, they shatter verisimilitude and invalidate what the player previously believed were decisions, no matter how small. So, why do Fake Choices emerge? I believe the main contributor is the developer setting a scope that is too wide. The developer sets their scope for realistic dialogues with NPCs that have tons of choices, but because they don't have the needed resources to create unique lines for every option, they _settle_ for a Fake Choice to trick the player. It's a short cut. Thus, I believe that Fake Choices can be solved by a narrowing of scope (assuming getting more resources isn't an option). Narrow the scope to the point where you don't need to cut corners and present the players with a Fake Choice. How a developer does this is up to them obviously. Less choices? Simpler wording? Cut dialogue completely? As an example of a narrowing of scope, look at the Souls Series. There's a "talk" button. They reduced their dialogue with NPC's to the absolute minimum it can be, because it didn't _need_ to be any more than that. They cut the fat. As a note, I want to add that not all Fake Choices are bad. For example, imagine a dialogue scene in an RPG with an ally who has been possessed by a demon, and you're presented with the following options: (1) Urge ally to fight back against the demon, (2) Demand the demon release your ally, (3) Ask what the demon wants. No matter what you choose, the demon immediately attacks. You kill the demon and later discover that the demon possessed your ally specifically because it wanted to kill you. In this case, the players dialogue choice don't matter, but this 'Fakeness' is consistent with the world presented by the game. It is not the developer cutting corners. In other words, *The World* is presenting you with a "Fake Choice" only because you lack the in-universe knowledge to know it is a fake choice, not because *The Developer* actively lying to you. This is fine and players who recognise such a "Fake Choice" will feel intelligent. No one will feel intelligent when they realise that your dialogue choices don't matter in some parts of Persona, just disappointed. *On Curated Experiences:* I think this part of the discussion is subjective. How much different players are comfortable with is individual. Based on the video, you sound like you're okay with them. However, I don't like them. I hate being manipulated, because it feels like an insult to my intelligence. If you want me to reliably end up in that _Critical Health_ state to make me excited, make the math and the mechanics produce that effect. Now this doesn't mean I don't like compensation mechanics. Getting a stacking "+2% chance to hit" buff every time you miss is a perfectly functional way to stop players from getting shafted by chance. I just don't like that it's hidden. As a final thought, lowering the difficulty in response to a failing player is frankly insulting and demeaning. LET ME GET MY ASS KICKED. Not everyone needs to be able to complete every game. It's okay for the hero to fail in their quest to save the princess. Anyway good video, but I heavily disagree with the ideas presented.
You put into words a feeling I was trying to express. It's too simple to say "it's the devs being lazy" because there's no guarantee that- without these lies- the game would have been designed better. However, you bring up lots of good examples of the nuance behind that broad idea, and where the feeling originates from. In a way, being forced not to lie, or to reduce scope to the bare essentials, seems to go hand in hand with a better designed game. I believe there are times that a game really will need to lie to the player. But I also believe those lies can be revealed in an organic way to still allow players to enjoy the game. Would the concept of a buff called 'rally' that makes your chance to hit increase in xcom, whenever you miss a few times in a row, suddenly reduce a player's enjoyment over just hiding that mechanic? It would be hard to convince me that the people who enjoy xcom would have just not enjoyed it if the devs just presented that tidbit organically.
Self Serving Bias: I saw a study were people were playing Monopoly and one person was given an extra $2,000 at the start of the game. They won easily, because of course they did, but they all still said they won because of skill and the extra money had nothing to do with it.
just like in real life : every millionaire is talented and poor people are obviously lazy... the game is still played a century later, but so many people still don't get the message
@@armelior4610 Well that's the message of the study. The message of the game is that laissez-faire capitalism is inherently flawed because it makes monopolies an inevitability and not just a possibility.
As someone who greatly cares about challenge in games, I absolutely despise dynamic difficulty adjustment. Don't quietly lower the difficulty for me when I am struggling, please. You're actually taking away what I want. It's especially insulting if it's dynamic difficulty adjustment in a game that has selectable difficulty settings.
Agreed, I think the difficulty should only shift upwards without asking the player. In my experience dynamic difficulty works best with relatively short games with limited lives, such as bullet hell shmups like Ikaruga or ZeroRanger.
Throbbers are at least handy because a static screen is indistinguishable from a frozen game. At least it's a reminder that the game is still doing something and in cases where a game has frozen or crashed is a sign that closing it down now might be the best thing to do.
I recall a time before Throbbers were common place and as a child you'd just sit there and wonder if the game was ACTUALLY loading or if it was time to pull the cartridge out and blow on it.
@@CuteSkyler If something is supposed to only take a few seconds at most, a throbber is fine. But if a process is found to take more than 10 seconds during testing... slap a loading bar on it.
Extra credits did an episode about automatically lowering the difficulty forever ago. They made the very valid point that the risk of the player finding out they were cheated out of a proper challenge can far outweigh the advantage of preventing them from getting frustrated. In the year 2024, it's no longer a risk but an inevitably. XCOM always felt like psuedo randomness, but the confirmation does retroactively sour my experience of the game. Simply not capping the hit chance would have gone a long way to reducing frustration without having to rig the dice.
Back in Amnesia: Dark Descent, a buddy and I were having fun playing through the game, and I made a joke of rushing one of the monster. After a swift defeat, the checkpoint was nearby and I joked "Time for round 2!" and charged again. Instead of killing the character again, the monster faded. It kind of made us realize the monsters were there to scare us as we progressed, not stop progression.
Game Devs Lying to Me isn't A Good Thing, Actually ; A Player's Rebuke (WARNING : long. TL;DR at bottom.) -Do loading bars REALLY count as lying if they're industry standard across the entire UI industry? Also, like you said, they serve the important purpose of telling the player the game isn't frozen. On higher-end machines this is less of an issue but back when I had a very low-end PC that would freeze constantly, that information was vital. The devs weren't lying to me when they were telling me the application was still running, and that's what mattered. -Health bars being unreliable, both mine and the enemies', is the exact reason why I'm always forced to turn on damage numbers in just about everything and I'm honestly sick of it. They're obnoxious, they clash with the artstyle, they rarely match the HUD, they're massively non-diegetic, but they're the only damn thing I can rely on. If I'm counting my shots because I don't have loads of ammo and I need to know exactly how many it'll take me to take down the enemy, or I'm in a fighting game and I see the enemy has a certain amount of health left, I can't rely on some wacky variable length bar for that info, I gotta count MaxEnemyHealth/ShotDamage or use that combo I labbed that does exactly that much damage, combo scaling included, or maybe a little more. Conversely, if you slap a big red obscuring vignette over my HUD when I'm at "low health", and especially if I'm actually fine, I'm gonna get angry, because that's the EXACT time I need to calm down, focus and get as much info as possible to survive, not "be in an adrenal state of panic". If I'm about to die, I need to IMMEDIATELY spot where the threat is from, what they're doing and which direction they're going, and indirectly reducing my FOV is the exact opposite of helping. I can tell I'm low health because A) I see the number on my HUD and B) good sound design lets me know before I even have to move my eyes, and I can get in an "adrenal state of panic" by myself when I'm at low health just fine, I don't need the game helping me on that one. -A lot of people have already mentioned it, but yeah, adaptive difficulty is more of a slap in the face. "Oh, is the widdle gamew too skiww issued to pway on the highew difficuwties? That's okay baby, wet's take you down to something mowe youw speed." If you're in a low difficulty and are breezing through, it's fine to gradually up the stakes until the player finds their sweet spot, but the players that instalock high difficulties are the very kind of people who don't mind dying over and over, and HATE being coddled above all else. Even just going "You've died a lot of times! Do you want to lower the difficulty?" is also insulting and only tilts the player more. In a similar vein, in something like PvE online multiplayer public instances, if a new player can select a higher difficulty with only the starting gear, either you make damn sure the starting gear can keep up or you lock them out of it entirely! They won't be able to carry their weight through no fault of their own, their teammates will have to carry them and lose out on an extra gun/sword/whatever, the newbie will feel useless, that's a recipe for a quitting newbie and some pissed off vets! (Looking at you, Helldivers 2, among many, MANY others.) -You THINK we don't see AI cheating. We do. Every time. It shows. STOP IT. Either develop better AI (tall order, I'm aware) or design the game around that limitation. I forget which game, some sci-fi PvE RTS I think, but I recall selecting its highest difficulty had the devs prompting the player to send them whatever non-cheese strat they found to win the game so they could patch it out, because the expectation was, upfront, that the AI would be cheating its ass off and you weren't really expected to win. THAT, I'm okay with (because it wasn't a lie, it was told upfront). The OG Dooms also told you that Nightmare was "Not Even Remotely Fair". Rubberbanding, wallhacking, odds tweaking, resource boosting, if you do that under the table, the player can (rightfully) blame the game and quit in disgust BECAUSE THEY WILL NOTICE IT. If you tell them from the start, it becomes part of the challenge; either the player seeks it out on their own or they drop back down a difficulty notch (this is how you incite the majority of your players to play on Normal, if you balanced your game around that difficulty, btw). STOP LYING. Players are okay with more than you think, if you tell them. -Random chance is a fickle thing to balance, I'm aware, but there are ways to avoid lying. BG3's Karmic Dice solve that elegantly, IMO. Turn them on and you get that doctored chance you mentioned, turn them off and you get the raw RNG experience. The player is given a CHOICE, not forced to accept skewed odds, even if in their own favor. Oh, and regarding that 10-miss streak on a 95% to-hit, that's 0.05^10=0.00000000000009765625 (9.765625 × 10^-14), or 0.000000000009765625%. That is about a BILLIONTH of a percent. To have something like this happen, you must have some SERIOUSLY rotten luck. If THIS scenario happens more than a single-digit number of times on the entirety of the planet, there's something seriously wrong with *YOUR* RNG, not the player's perception of it. Luck _that_ bad is something you brag about, not regularly experience. -Again, if you tell people upfront, they'll be okay with more than you think. You'll never make a game for everyone. Find your target demo, analyze their wants, then build the experience around that. Animal Crossing doesn't need adaptive difficulty, neither does Elden Ring. They cater to certain playerbases that want certain things out of their games and don't need difficulty tweaking in the background, for perfectly opposite reasons. And those games sold gangbusters. To me, adaptive difficulty is just casting too big a net and shows a lack of commitment. "Oh, was that too hard? I'm sorry, let's make it a bit easier for you. Oh, was that too easy? I'm sorry, let's make it a bit more challenging." Completely muddies the very idea of a challenge. It's like playing tag with someone who will both sprint full tilt away from you and do that slow fake run, they're just being an ass. Pick a lane. *TL;DR* : No, honesty is the better policy, more often than not. There is a market for unreasonably hard games, and for ridiculously easy games. The former attract a playerbase that at best tolerates the presence of lower difficulties, and the latter attract a playerbase that doesn't want to be told the game could be harder. If your game falls somewhere inbetween, design for THAT difficulty level, don't cater to everyone. You'll always, ALWAYS have people going "ooh this was so easy" and "waah this is way too hard", no matter how many tricks you pull. You brought up "self-serving bias", I retort "squeaky wheel principle". Those who find the difficulty "just right" rarely go on forums and say "yeah the difficulty was just perfect for me". This attitude of "there's a little something for everyone" is, in my opinion, the exact thing killing most AAA games of late : "can't possibly risk alienating anyone from our game! we've spent far too much money to risk a flop!" and then of course it flops because a game for everyone is a game for no one.
The only games where I've seen adaptive difficulty actually work really well is in bullet hell shmups like Ikaruga, DoDonPachi DOJ and ZeroRanger. If the player performs well, the difficulty starts to increase, new and different enemy waves will spawn and bosses will have entirely new attacks. If the player dies, then the difficulty goes down, but since the player has a very limited amount of lives, and the goal of the game is to beat the whole game with one credit (1CC), the player can't abuse the dynamic difficulty by killing themselves repeatedly to make the game easier like in RE4 for example.
@@Bluesine_R It's less bad, but I think it's still very bad. Adapting the difficulty down if you fail your 1cc means you cannot practice against the later stage high difficulty stuff. You either have a successful 1cc or play on easy mode, no practice. It would be better to just have difficulties selected from the start, if you play nightmare mode you get nightmare mode difficulty all the way through. You can argue that's the point, you're not supposed to be able to practice against the final bosses high difficulty moves, you only get one shot at it each time you manage to perfect the whole game. It's just like playing a hard bossfight with 13 phases and no checkpoints. To which I would say screw you I'm not playing that crap.
I'm going to agree with the comments saying that the moment the player becomes aware they're being lied to, it's bad. I'm confident that games have successfully lied to me before, but I don't know of many times where I realized it and felt better about the experience. Suddenly having an easier section of the game that I've been dying to, or becoming aware of Karmic Dice, or Undertale's health bar gradient making it impossible to actually determine your health from a quick glance...they're bad. It's a risk developers take when they code in lying (which does have to happen to an extent, I'm aware) but it has to be hidden for it to not feel cheap to the player, in one way or the other.
There's a lot of people rightfully pointing out that they don't want adaptive difficulty turning down the challenge of their game, so I'll note that the opposite is also desireable. If I'm the kind of person who, when presented with a theoretical 5 difficulty options, selects the second-to-hardest, or third-hardest if given 7 options (can't remember a game going that granular before, though), then I've likely found that to be a fun level of challenge for me through experience. Like, whenever I replay Dead Space 2, as a personal example, the difficulty above Normal feels pleasantly balanced for how I like things, with the one after being only good for if I want to task myself. If the game decides to go "Way to go, champ! Let's crank things up and see how good you can get!", when I wanted a consistent experience to measure my own skills against, then I'm just going to be temporarily frustrated that the game is set to a higher difficulty. Then, I'm still going to be worried about the game going *too low* of a difficulty, because I'm rarely going to always perform at Hard But Not Very Hard skill during a play session. I remember coming up against this problem with Guilty Gear Xrd Rev2, actually; the Arcade mode (or whatever the mode where you play 10 matches and then get a story snippet is called) constantly adjusts the difficulty up and down based on wins and losses, and it's so easy to go from "mechanically satisfying opponent AI" to "fight-stick-reading digital bastard" and back again because of this. It puts a monstrous chip on me hard-but-not-very-hard-shoulder. Movement speed is also a peeve for me. The original Mass Effect basically had Shepard pretend to sprint at a walking pace, with a zoomed in camera. This isn't slick, it's lame, it might as well add speed lines to the walking animation, and I wanted to throttle the Bioware team one-by-one when I figured this out. Which, if I wasn't prickly about it, I would've figured out with the Remastered trilogy where they made the sprint absurdly effective.
Yup. Exactly counter to the video's point. If the game can make itself easier to allow you to progress, why can't it make itself effectively impossible to beat to "build tension"? Dying/burning a bunch of resources means nothing. The game wanted to take that stuff away from you, so it turned the difficulty up to 11 to get it done. Once it was finished, it went back to creampuff mode so you'd feel "accomplished" for overcoming something so difficult.
@@nonyabidness8676 Yep, I wish there was a consistent mod or something for REmake 2, killing a zombie in 3 shots than suddenly when you did your part and saved a lot of ammo by dodging or ignoring enemies, the next zombie took 7 shots just felt frustrating.
This video shouldn't have spoken so absolutely about what players "really" want, and it shouldn't have used background footage from games that weren't specifically covered in the video. Does Dark Souls have adaptive difficulty? Does it have logarithmic health bars? I don't know, but you're playing footage from it. I just played Resident Evil 8 in VR, after several regular playthroughs I've done in the past. I know how RE lies to the player, so I liked that I beat Standard difficulty without ever dying. But if I play on Hard, I sure as hell should be dying. If I had never played the game before, I sure as hell should be dying. I got stuck on one room in Uncharted 4 for two hours, because that game WASN'T lying, and now I can be proud that I beat that BS Crushing difficulty. About hit chances, I play Fire Emblem. FE lies to the player, using two random numbers instead of one to reinforce likely hits and likely misses. I know that, and I'm glad I do! My preference is to know when a game is lying to me, because then I know the game is working with me to have fun. If these systems are lurking in secret, then I have to wonder whether my experience is what I actually want or if I'm being fed a fixed rollercoaster that I didn’t ask for.
Dark Souls doesn't have adaptive difficulty or logarithmic health bars, and either of those features would be awful to have in that game. Adaptive difficulty would ruin the feeling of overcoming a fair challenge, and logarithmic health bars would make it needlessly difficult for the player to make decisions around their and their opponent's health levels. Definitely a questionable choice of B-roll footage.
Your video had two of the primary examples of games I refuse to play anymore: - Mario Party - Mario Kart After years of eating blue shells and lightning bolts, I just don't have patience for being punished for being good at the game anymore. I'll play other non-Mario kart games, assuming they don't pull the same shenanigans, but I won't touch Mario Kart. Same with Mario Party. I *always* make the mistake of playing to win, and wind up losing to the guy that's comfortable with sandbagging until the final turns. I still remember the last time I played, and I knew the moment I was screwed was when the game gave me a push into the lead, but there were clearly too many turns remaining to maintain my position until the end. The game then proceeded to hold me down and ransack my coins and stars, until I was firmly in last place. I also remember the point where I checked out from Resident Evil 4. I was trying to figure out how to clear the reflecting pool room, and I noticed that the crossbow guards on the elevated platforms disappeared after a couple of attempts. What was an exciting encounter that I was trying to puzzle out became a boring little stroll as the enemies formed a conga line and charged me. So, no. I hate being lied to. I hate sandbagging being rewarded. I hate having the majority of my characters' health concentrated in the final portion of their health bar.
This reminds of me of the kerfuffle with Anthem where players realized the damage numbers were meaningless, that the best gun was the default one as it actually killed in less shots than the legendary ones.
In anthems....defense? It was also a game that had a significant amount of problems because of horrendous mismanagement. I doubt they were even thinking of balance or anything like that when they had PR people going "we've been developing this game for over two years now" and the devs sitting by and going "wait....what? since when?"
Logarithmic health bars combined with damage indicators that make the whole screen go red/grey absolutely ruin a game. I don’t want to spend the whole game in grayscale, listening to a throbbing heartbeat. In fact, I’d prefer if that never happened.
That health bar inconsistency sounds SO horrible. It means you don't know how much health you actually have. Which is just basic information. It's like you're playing chess on a computer and sometimes your pieces can move differently. Like how... what caused that? And it's just impossible to know. But it's a basic rule that you NEED to know.
I get it when the health bar is fudged for narrative reasons, to make the player feel close to death or hide that a sequence is actually just a victory lap. But that only works if it's done sporadically: When the entire game runs on a non-linear health bar, it's just annoying.
Bioshock makes enemies that you don't see fire slower and aim worse. As a veteran FPS player, I always try to keep the enemies in my vision, which in this case makes them harder than they are supposed to be. In Bayonetta, enemies outside of your current camera view also attack slower and move slower towards you. It's used in higher level play to split the enemies for a more favorable outcome.
In games that feature "sniper" enemies, they are often hard-coded to miss their first shot to ensure that players know they're there so they can plan around them.
It's a tricky one to get right. On the one hand it sucks to get hit in such a rhythm that the pause an enemy has that allows you to counter is filled by another enemy starting their combo. Jedi Survivor could be bad for that, often leaving you no openings to attack On the other hand you get the earlier Assassins Creed games where you can *see* the enemies around you not attack because you're fighting someone. And it ALWAYS sucks to get blindsided by an attack from off screen.
@@DragonNexusI think this raises the question of "which behaviour constitutes 'lying to the player'?" Changing enemy behaviour based on external factors like visibility, or hiding dangers offscreen where the player can't effectively react to them?
An example of lying that really pisses me of is the dice rolls in Baldurs Gate 3. As someone who has a lot of experience with the D20, the RNG manipulation it openly skews the results towards the extreme, meaning that actual build choices and character specialization kinda stop applying. To Larians credit, this system can be turned off. Also, unless their presence is explicitly spelled then hidden, automatic difficulty adjustments can go die in a fire. Most games I play are at least partially for the challenge so the possibility of it being tweaked without me knowing basically undermines the point of the playing.
The horse in Inquisition was probably a really bad example to use when everyone and their mother was roasting that thing for being so completely useless.
little correction, We RTS players are generally pretty aware that the AI is cheating, Some RTS even pull back the curtain and let us know how much an AI is cheating, and even let us tweak certain values like resource generation or build speed. We just kinda accept that because its the only way the AI can really offer a challenge beyond the learning phases of the game, and sometimes winning an unfair fight can be its own fun.
Devs, please, just don't lie when playing in a higher difficulty. We're in to improve and face adversity, nothing feels worse than finding out you got invisible help after you beat a higher difficulty.
Fantastic idea! I want to see FROMSoft remove all the i-frames from their games so you can't take advantage of the frames of invincibility they provide you with to give you a fighting chance against enemies you would realistically stand no chance against. And while we're at it, lets make the hitboxes in Touhous represent the actual size of the sprites themselves and make it so that they register 100% of the time. Honestly, people like yourself have absolutely no idea just how much assistance you're given behind the scenes that you don't even notice because games are balanced around them and if you remove them, the games stop being fun (or become practically impossible.)
I mean, higher difficulties are inherently based on lies. Because the developer is giving the 'enemy' advantages that they didn't have on normal difficulty. But I see what you mean about not giving secret assists when in high difficulties. Though I guess the real problem isn't the assist as much as the game being 'found out' and spoiling the perceived experience.
I feel like that's something you *think* you want, but if you actually got it, you'd hate it. Like if music players chose shuffled songs 100% randomly.
@@DragonNexus That was one of the things I loved about Winamp 2. When set to shuffle it would play the entire playlist exactly once before is started over. You could even scroll through the list and see which songs had been played and not.
Surprised he didn't mention Coyote Time, an industry term for a trick/lie where a player is given a brief moment after moving off a ledge before they start falling. This is most useful in platformers, especially 1st person games as you can't look at your feet to gauge distance to the edge while doing other things, so they give players a buffer so players with bad timing can still jump from the ledge even if slightly too late.
@@DragonNexus To be fair those examples are good ones, they're just much harder to get right without the player noticing. And in racing games it's a bit of a no-win situation as whether or not to use rubber banding. If you don't races are won on pure skill but the most skilled players may be left unchallenged as once they get a big enough lead there's no way the AI racers can catch up, bar some major error by the player, leading to boredom. However using rubberbanding poorly leads to races where the player is incapable of gaining any kind of lead and any tiny error lead them to fall behind immediately resulting in them being overpunishing and constantly overintense in the amount of concentration needed to win. And it doesn't help that the good amount of rubber banding is different from player to player so there needs to a subsystem monitoring player behaviour and figuring out race to race, moment to moment, how much rubberbanding is needed without the player noticing.
@@PlebNC I half remember Mario Kart 8's system where it will asign the other racers with a role. Can't find the dang video that explained it. One is your rival and works hardest to keep up with you. Some are more about being in the way. Some are asigned the role off bad driver and are easily passed. They worked to make it so races were exciting but not cheap. If your rival gets ahead, their car slows down so you can catch up. It's rubber banding, but it's done more smartly. There's always a character in a race that you start hating because the game has asigned them as your rival. Edit: Okay, I didn't even remember the game right. It was Mario Kart 64 ruclips.net/video/rt25DfiTKqc/видео.html
Yeah no, gonna have to disagree with that. Very few things feel as terrible as catching a game lying to you, it completely destroys suspension of disbelief. In fact, it makes the problem of people blaming the game instead of themselves worse, because once they know that the game can outright lie to you deliberately, they will start second guessing everything and making up scenarios where the game did them dirty.
Well that's the whole thing isn't it? Deception that you realize happened is inherently failed deception. Of course the experience is worse. A failed crafting system would make the experience worse. I don't think that's a condemnation of crafting systems, just a condemnation of people trying to shove them into games where they clearly don't work. Most of the highest rated games out there use some forms of deception. Some in small ways. Some in really big ones. But they're great games, and that is at least in part because of those deceptions.
There's a few game genres where I think it's okay. Like, for example, any time you're adapting a board game into a video game and you have difficulty. How the hell else is the computer supposed to be hard to beat if they can't cheat on their dice rolls? Or a strategy game, it makes sense that the computer would need to cheat because programming proper strategy is pretty goddamn hard. Recently with modern AI advancements that might be changing, but still point stands. Now with all that being said, I think this is actually the reason for the rise of souls likes. More and more people are getting where they can see through the deception naturally.
@@FireFox64000000 I think the change in the audiences ability to perceive a lie is actually hugely important to video game deception. Early racing games that used rubber banding were pretty popular and it was generally well received. But most players then didn't know what rubber banding was. In modern times, rubber banding is practically a swear word in racing games. Because it is a deception that will always fail today. People are looking for it. I think it's also important to point out that a lot of deception games do has little to do with difficulty or making AI harder to beat. It's more often disguising the game parts of the game. Papering over the things that would ruin your immersion or lying to you about loading screens so it doesn't FEEL as bad.
There's a balance. There is a ton of benefit to games lying to you, but if they lie BADLY it can bring the whole experience down. Just like any other tool.
I don’t play this game but I hear FIFA players bemoaning ‘scripting’ all the time. I gather they’re talking about the game basically manufacturing an event with the player powerless to avoid it. I bet that half of the time, it was nothing to do with scripting but the idea has got in their head
Changing difficulty settings mid-game against the players' wishes is a garbage thing to do, and finding out that a game did that destroys any sense of accomplishment players may have had upon beating a hard game. Having a separate mode with those settings is fine but it should NEVER be the default. I picked Hard for a reason, let me play on Hard. If the devs want to go the extra mile, being able to change difficulty settings after the game starts is good as long as it's the player's choice. -And rigged RNG rates are just inexcusable.
I think it's a matter of context. The fact that the first bullet fired always misses in a Bioshock fight? Yeah, people miss. Especially when it's dark and you got shaky hands from injecting drugs all day. Devil May Cry 4 bumping down the difficulty of a boss fight and then not telling me until after I beat it, and penalizing me for it when I never wanted the downgrade? HELL NO!
BG3s "karmic dice" If you turn it on they will fail you often to keep things interesting If you turn them off you will succeed almost everything assuming you build for those checks.
I really wish there was an option to turn the dynamic difficulty off. I understand why it's there, but I work very hard not to fall victim to the self serving bias trap by assuming I'm shit unless empirically proved otherwise, and observing dynamic difficulty robs me of any sense of achievement
I personally hate when difficulty is shifted in the background. I find I either notice it happening or consider it random chance that the AI did something that made things easier or harder, and blame the game design for making me rely on enemies doing a specific attack pattern or glitching out and not doing anything. It never feels like I got better or worse, and more that I got lucky or unlucky. Plus I love trying to overcome a challenge, so it's not fun when I'm handed a win.
I totally get that, but I'm also reminded of a stand up routine from Dara O'brien. A video game is the only medium with stories where you can be told you aren't good enough to see it. And a developer deciding that that's bad is valid. I don't think it makes it bad design inherently. Obviously developers can and do also include things like easy mode. But that ALSO feels bad. So it's not a silver bullet solution either. Not enjoying it is totally valid. But I think it's important to recognize the value a thing can have even if it isn't our taste.
There is always the option of just asking the player if they want to change difficulty. There have been games out there where death streaks trigger a loading screen notice about adjustable difficulty
@@playathesaints9599 Nobody wants to be told they're playing on easy mode so makes it less enjoyable for many people that do use it. And many people won't use it, even when they should. People will often choose hard mode even if they KNOW it will make the experience less enjoyable. And then end up quitting half way through. Everybody doesn't work that way. But many do. It's a well documented problem and I can almost guarantee if you google something like "the problem with difficulty settings" there'll be about 27 thousand videos and articles that pop up discussing this and the many other issues they have. I'm honestly surprised you'd be the kind of person to watch a video from Second Wind and not have already heard this a dozen times. But then, you never know. Have fun out there.
@@karl0ssus1 Of course, but unfortunately choosing an easier difficulty is hard for some people. It feels condescending to even be asked. And if feels like defeat to choose it. And when you think about it, that's most of the problem people have with automatic difficulty. It's just that they only feel that if they catch on. So it doesn't really solve the problem, does it?
The way Portal 2 just quietly swaps the blue and orange portals in certain high intensity sections so that whichever portal you shoot out turns out to be the right one fascinates me. It is an elegant solution to keep things going, and subtle enough I never noticed until it was pointed out.
@@LethargicScientist Yep. Only in quick live-or-die situations though. Like "The Part Where He Kills You". Whichever portal you place underneath yourself will let you escape, regardless of what you put up on the catwalk. The catwalk portal just gets swapped to match if you hit the wrong trigger.
Interesting that you added in imagery of the Obra Din at the end... As I can't think of any needed systems or mechanics that would be 'lying ' in that.
0:59 "let's look at loading screens" he says at the EXACT moment my RUclips page has a problem loading the video. I wondered if this guy was having a laugh at me for a moment until I realized it was on my end and laughed myself.
I've seen the levers being pulled in RE2 remake, and it was infuriating. Zombies that used to go down in 3 bullets were taking 8-12 bullets because I was good at managing my resources...which made managing those resources feel like it didn't matter at all, because it's just going to turn the dial on how many of them I need depending on how many I have.
I think this lying can often backfire. If the player becomes aware of it, it can lessen the experience. I play quite a lot of tabletop games and those games can’t lie. I really don’t know why it would be that important in video games.
Honestly, the DA:I horse sprint was something that made me quite disinterested in the game. Like... why include a feature that's unusable? It wasn't good, and I felt that it was condescending they included it. I felt very negatively about the objective truth that I wasn't actually getting anywhere faster. Wish they just pointed me to the fast travel instead.
I remember playing Soldier of Fortune 2. It was *extremely* obvious that the AI was wallhacking. You would open doors and discover enemies standing there with their guns already pointed at you, ready to fire, and once you got the gun with the scope that sees through walls, you could see them standing on the other side of the door with their guns tracking you. I can usually tell when the developers are faking a search with the enemies (if the searching enemies are always wandering towards the player that they supposedly can't see, that's a big tell), and it's annoying, but in SoF2 it was egregious. Also, it's generally obvious when all your narrative choices in a game lead to the same point. I don't necessarily mind, unless a big deal has been made about the player's narrative agency.
There's a difference between something like that and F.E.A.R. which felt like it had insanely good AI. But it was a lot of trickery and smoke and mirrors. But in the moment, it feels like they're trying to outsmart you. So you in turn outsmart them.
Game mechanics that heavily harmed my enjoyment in games: RE4 dynamic difficulty: when the spawn of 8 enemies was reduced to 4 I kept almost beating. When it happened I was concerned I broke the game, as restarting didn't bring back the 8 enemies. Thankfully turning off the GC and reloading did fix it, but finding out that the difficulty was lowered really harmed my enjoyment m thankfully, the hardest the hardest difficulty disables it, but it's my one big red checkmark against RE4. Telltale the walking dead *will remember that" when I put one character through the ringer, disagreeing with the at every chance, yet still was willing to do everything I said really made the game experience hollow and took the fun I had up to it and really soured my expectations for the rest of the game and I felt disengaged to play any sequels. Just wanted to say, doing these lies do cause harm directly to the player, and it's up to the dev to see if the tradeoff is worth it.
The “will remember that” thing really is the worst way to do that sort of game, imo. If the devs wanted to show that the player affected the outcome of the game, they’d show something on screen at the time of the decision point, reminding the player of a choice they made prior. Much more impactful imo for the player to go “oh yeah, that was a thing I did”.
@@crushycrawfishy1765 Not at all, because they just discussed about how many of those upfront messages are a lie: Many Telltale choices are pure illusion of choice, they don't actually matter, or not significantly. That deception is much harder to pull off if the game instead reminds you of your choice when it actually has consequences, rather than just telling you that it will have them.
I remember for The Walking Dead Season 1 I looked at all the branching paths… I found out your choices don’t matter. Everything comes to the same conclusion. If you save a character, the other one dies or leaves by the next episode until they’re all gone. I guess because they were planning multiple seasons, you’d have to reach an equilibrium at some point because it would become an exponential problem on the dev side. But if there’s no continuation between seasons then why and how can I get invested? My choices have no meaning. I didn’t bother with the other seasons or even other Telltale games after that. Better off playing a Supermassive game. Because as dumb and hokey as they are (and barely games) at least they have multiple endings so your choices actually matter.
My favorite example of a game's lies is with the first Amnesia game. Since dying repeatedly to the same enemies would completely ruin any sense of horror (and replace it with plain frustration), the devs did a sneaky and actually despawn certain enemies if you die to them too much. The game won't tell you this, of course, so you'll always feel like you just missed that terrible monster. Finding this out, though, also ruins the horror - which is why I'm glad I only found out after I had already beaten the game!
Didn't Amnesia actually have it so that you could never actually die? As in there there is no fail state whatsoever, it just makes you believe there is by outright lying to you?
Yeah, I've noticed it a lot in a number of games I've played. I drop those games or bump the difficulty up because I hate being lied to. I want my failures and successes to actually be meaningful. Once the smoke and mirror illusion is shattered so to is any sense or feeling of accomplishment. I'm playing Borderlands 2 right now and, even though I find the gameplay loop boring and the death/respawn mechanic annoying, I also noticed that I feel like I've accomplished a lot by defeating a difficult enemy that killed me once before. By thinking about the fight I was just in, what the enemy's attack patterns are, what the enemy's health type is (health, armor, or shields) and which damage type among the weapons I have stockpiled can get the job done I feel a real sense of growth and accomplishment. If I notice that the enemy I'm fighting is too strong and keeps killing me over and over again and suddenly it gets easier to kill when I haven't changed anything I put the game down and never pick it up again. I make small games in my spare time and I've noticed that the games I make that people have the most fun in are the games where I'm brutally honest about the difficulty. They get more and more determined to win and then feel incredibly accomplished in the end when they finally succeed. I believe games should be tough, but honest and fair. Lying to your players to "keep them engaged" makes us no better than designers of slot machines. Just designing a game to make them think "this time for sure!" when in reality the game was rigged from the start. Edit: I also just remembered an example of why these lies are unnecessary: board games! Also tabletop games like D&D. These wouldn't be successful like they are if lying to the players was a necessity.
I find myself in strong opposition to your defense of this practice. You say "what matters is how the player feels during the experience," but I disagree. While how we feel during play IS important, so is how we feel after playing, in retrospect. Looking back on a game experience and realizing that it was all artificial and built on lies diminishes the experience. I want a game to give it to me straight, and if it can't generate the thrill and tension organically, it hasn't been designed well enough. "Players never notice it." Like hell we don't. I notice fairly often (not always), and it always annoys me.
I have a top level reply talking about the same thing before I read yours. RTS games are so awful for this, and I hate it. You should be able to practice and gain skills by playing against an AI before going against human opponents, but the skills you learn to beat the AI are useless in PvP. You're not leaning to be better at the game, you're learning how to manipulate the AI. I suppose other genres can fudge the math a bit more behind the scenes, but it's dead obvious in an RTS where it should be impossible for the AI to have the resources it does given how many workers they've built and the time that has passed.
You only noticed the times it was obvious. For every 1 time the deception failed, 99 times it succeeded. Game devs HAVE to do this, not because it's a code or philosophy that you can choose to do or not, but because games would be too easy if they didn't. I guarantee your favorite game does this a thousand times and you'd hate the game if it didn't. Games wouldn't feel fun. Good game devs know that games are crafted experiences, not fully immersive worlds. That part's the illusion. You just don't like having that bubble burst, but every game that didn't intentionally craft an experience in this way you've instantly discarded as a "bad game". One that feels unfair. One that feels like no playtesting was done whatsoever. You can't make intelligent, challenging AI because we aren't using Machine Learning algorithms for video game AI yet. They're just a few simple lines of code. Games are inherently deception. The threes can't be cut in half, they're just triangle meshes with a 2D texture over it. If you really want fairness and no deception your only real option is to play against another human who's just as favored by the game as you are because it's required that there's an equal intelligence on the other side to be weighed against yours in order to create a proper challenge.
@@gwen9939 You're making a lot of bold assumptions about what I do and don't notice. There are games where I notice it, but still like the game *in spite of* it. Then there are games, like Total War, that totally cheat based on difficulty setting, but most of those cheats are openly displayed in the settings, so it isn't lying. And it's not like Super Mario made the timer tick down more slowly once you got low on time, or made your hitbox smaller if you died too often. There are ways to design games with minimal deception. Some genres, like competitive FPS or fighting games will likely need to keep giving the AI cheats for some time to come, but those are tailor made for multiplayer, anyway, and playing against AI is terrible practice because of the AI reading inputs and reacting frame-perfectly, or seeing through walls, and so on. A game outright lying to me with false information feels a lot less excusable to me. I'm a big boy. I can handle the truth.
Man this dropped a lot of imagery without examples. Is this just random footage or like, show your working? I've played a lot of these things without seeing things, I'm genuinely unaware if these are cases of the discussed subtle hidden easy modes happening I haven't noticed or just bait?
I think it really does matter if a game is coddling me by lowering the difficulty and trying to hide it after I fail a few times. It's both insulting and depriving me of the sense of accomplishment I wanted, when a game decides FOR ME that I can't handle a certain challenge. Let me bash my head against a wall until it breaks if that's what I'm into, don't just remove the wall entirely, without asking, when you think I've had enough.
While i completely understand the sentiment and personally i would not like my walls removed, i also see why games do this. It takes some degree of maturity or commitment to decide to try a thing until you succeed. Many people would like to think that they are up to the challenge, but in a moment of rage they give up or quit the game. Others just don't enjoy losing repeatedly and want to experience the rest of the game without the frustrating part, and devs don't want to lose these people. Like you said, people could be insulted when told this upright, so some games just hide this "help".
I don’t see the issue with that if a game has a lower difficulty. And if the player doesn’t want to lower the difficulty and doesn’t want to pass the wall they can log off the game.
@@Lilith_Harbinger Exactly this. Lot of these comments have a lot of panties in a twist, but most of them would throw the controller in a rage and quit the game if the "help" was removed. Devs need to protect players from themselves as part of their job. They just can't make it too obvious.
@@crushycrawfishy1765 Then by this logic, can't games also at least ALWAYS give me help at any point in the game I need it? So many games give me help I didn't need or want because I screwed up only a handful of times early on in a not very hard early part. Points where I absolutely still wanted to keep trying, and if anything killed my fun, it was ruining my ability to feel accomplishment by making the challenge easier, not the challenge being too hard. But then fast forward to the endgame, I'm at try number 57 on the final optional super boss. I haven't had any fun for a while now, am making no further progress with each attempt, my misery has far, far overwhelmed my pride, and I am as close to controller smashing rage as I ever reach. I would GLADLY take a whole lot of help to finally just get that over with, as much help as it takes. All I want is for it to be over. And of course, OF COURSE the game won't do anything to help at that point. if it's so damn important to make sure players are never ever frustrated by challenge, why are games so willing to make the easy early game even easier but never willing to make the hardest parts easier? Anti-frustration measures should cover the entire game if it's so important, not just the main plot content.
One that struck (while watching a let's play) is the xenomorph in Alien Isolation knows where you are in a broad sense enough though it shouldn't. There is a recurring situation where there are two boxes, usually the same size with a similar number of rooms, which will be attached by a single corridor meaning when you need to go from box to the other you have one route. A thing I noticed is the xenomorph is always in the same box as you even though it shouldn't be able to know you are in that box while also not being able to find you under that god damn table inches away from it. I am fine with manipulated information for the sake of the moment but I hate it when I can't count on information I need to make accurate choices. This is why I prefer a numeric value or specific increment resource. I want to know how much health I am losing to a given hit so I can pick my time to choose a dodge over a trade since us both hitting for 5 health when I have 10 and the other player has 5 is win and vice versa is a loss. Once I know I can't trust information I need then I find it hard to treat any information as trustworthy. This one was a big problem in Baldur's Gate, so big the devs even talked about it, was the assumption of the ticking clock because characters say there is one when there isn't. Even though people can say you're told the Mindflayer transformation isn't progressing as it should the majority of opinions and lessons taught to you on the mindflayer ship make it clear that's not conclusive. This means you push yourself to the limit and avoid sleeping as much as possible to ward off the transformation that you were told can happen in an instant because someone hits a button.
"Players don't like true randomness, you think you do but you don't." Counter-argument: Kenshi I've been playing a lot of Kenshi recently and it's shown me just how much I don't care for game devs lying to me. Kenshi is a game where the game rules are universal, if I can beat enemies within an inch of their life and steal the clothes off their back, the same can happen to me. If a boss is so powerful that he can solo your entire army, you too can become powerful enough to solo his entire army. It is a game that revels in chaos but I can never call any of it unfair because I was the one who tried to walk into town with stolen goods. I am the one who saw the dozen bandits coming from a mile away and thought I could solo them, etc. The game is hard but all of it's challenges are clearly advertised as such and most of the player's failure comes from overestimating their own readiness.
I mean, your mindset of, "it doesn't matter as long as they don't notice," isn't wrong, per se, but it does ignore the fundamental problem of lying: no one likes being lied to. Even and perhaps especially if the lie was, "you're really skilled and did it all on your own you big boy you!" But a similar demoralization can easily come from the game just pulling a "fuck you I win" routine because they devs couldn't make an AI that competes with the player on a level playing field. Sure, programming better AI might not be practical, or even possible, but that doesn't mean that the players skilled enough to push the AI so hard it starts cheating aren't going to be the most likely to notice and be pissed that their skills now don't matter. It's much better to just be honest about an asymmetric playing field at higher difficulty levels and then cap the experience so that skilled players can get a sense of completeness from having surpassed what AI can throw their way. Or give an optional super-upgrade like Mario does which the player can pointedly ignore, or keep giving reminders that you're doing this to yourself, Dave, you could lower the difficulty at any time! There's _always_ a better solution than just blatantly lying like that, especially in a medium where the people who care enough to notice are going to be the most upset that there's a lie at all. The code-trawlers, the sweaty tryhards, etc. Sure, I had a decently fun time testing my "sword" skills against the NPC fencers in the swordplay games on Wii Sports Resort, but eventually the fact that they were winning because the game just refused to accurately put my sword where the remote was telling it to go became unacceptably difficult to deal with, the necessary routines I had to go through to swing accurately that the AI just skipped were too much, and so despite the fact that in a fair contest I probably could have beat them I just threw up my hands. That was a tech issue, not technically the game lying to me...but it's a similar principal. If the game initially acts like one thing's going to be the case (a fair duel between swordsmiis who both have equal control over their swords) and then proceeds to for reasons you'll have a hard time spotting in the moment just _not_ deliver on that promise...the game has failed.
@@pinkysweets I agree with where you're coming from I think, but I wouldn't say that exactly. You can lie to people in ways that aren't beneficial to them at all. SOME lies enhance a game. Some just suck. Some will fail because they aren't good at deception and they get found out. Some will fail because they never achieved the good thing they were going for in the first place.
As far as i know this is not done in "difficult" settings but in "beginner" or normal ones. The point of most of these invisible helps is to make the game more accessible to people who have a hard time with it, so obviously it's not for people who WANT to have a hard time.
With all of the Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Elden Ring b-roll in this video I feel like it's worth talking about how those games *don't* lie to you, and why it's important that they don't. These games are meant to be tough, dying a lot is part of the intended experience, but they're also meant to feel fair. People play them because they want to overcome their challenges by their own effort. Quietly adjusting the game's difficulty in the background would ruin that experience, as progressing would become less about learning to overcome the game's obstacles and more about just dying until the game gives you a free pass. The moment players catch on to this kind of thing, you lose the ability to give them a feeling of accomplishment for winning a fight. And it's not really possible to keep players from catching on in a game where they're expected to die a lot.
A good episode, but you keep doubling down saying "players never notice this or if they do, care" and I think that is just wrong. I have noticed every one of your examples, maybe not at the time but as I have played games I have noticed them. I don't bring it up because I largely buy into the developer's conclusions, though I do think it has made them lazy in some regard. My go-to example is the AI in half-life one seemed more like a special military force trying to hunt down Mr. Freeman than the decades waves of meat grinder-bound, hit-scan idiots in things like COD or Red Dead Redemption.
I've developed the habit of purposefully trying to find cracks in game design (don't know why probably just from having played for 25 years) and honestly, yeah I don't like the mechanical lies - the worst offenders seem to be linear narratives and some action games. Often I'll explore every nook and cranny and sometimes miss scripted events because I'm looking the wrong way, or I'll stop running in a chase sequence just to see how much the game tries to slow down for me not to get caught For action games some of them will give a slow motion QTE prompt and I've sat idle just to find out that after a full minute, they didn't program a fail state so everything is frozen until you react to the "quick" time event
You say players rarely notice these lies, but a large amount of the examples you gave I not only noticed but actually lessened my game experience. Usually when I find out a game lowers the difficulty to match my performance I lose interest in playing because I don't feel like I'm actually improving. That said I agree with you that with the nature of AI and simulation it is necessary. The Dragon Age horse example isn't great however. I used to think it provided a small speed boost, but due to actual speed not matching the speed special effects they showed, it actually felt slower that walking.
As a long time fighting game enthusiast and competitor, I despise the practice of scaling health bars in fighting games. It is just done to sell fake hype to spectators who don't know any better, making actually close matches look like insurmountable comebacks. To the actual players it just makes the information provided on the screen more difficult to decipher. This gets exacerbated even further when the scaling is character specific (looking at you, Guilty Gear).
What? Scaling in fighting games has always been a thing. Otherwise each match would just be three combos and the round is over or we'd have what MK1 is where combos go on forever because they do such little damage.
@@crushycrawfishy1765 You seem to have misinterpreted me, so please allow me to clarify. What you are referring to is called combo scaling, where each hit of a combo does less damage the longer a combo lasts. This is good and healthy for the game as it discourages long/infinite combos and rewards creative play around resets and mixups. I'm all for it. What I am rallying against here is the health bar itself scaling, that is to say when you take less damage at lower health. This is not the same thing, and mechanically it accomplishes basically nothing while obfuscating important information from the players. If a 25% full health bar is actually 50% of your health, then the screen is lying to you and the information can't be trusted. In the most egregious cases, it can actually encourage long drawn-out combos at low health, because if every hit is doing 1 damage, then you might as well just string as many low-damage hits together as possible for efficiency (again, looking at you, Guilty Gear). I can name numerous examples - both old and modern - that have used this type of system (Street Fighter 4, every Guilty Gear game), and that haven't (every Marvel VS Capcom Game, Dragon Ball FighterZ, BlazBlue). Aside, I find it funny that you mentioned 3-combo rounds as if that would be a problem, when many of the popular modern 2D fighting games (SF6, GGST, UNI2, even MK1) are very specifically and very intentionally designed around 3-combo rounds, give or take a combo depending on super meter.
Good quality as always, but the take is terrible imho. I absolutely hate when games lie to me, and the very fact that any game I play at any time just might be lying, even if it isn't, takes away so much of my enjoyment. Struggles feel forced and unavoidable and accomplishments feel hollow, unless I can know for a fact that I've gotten them fair and square. Nothing sucks more than feeling like you've only won because the game let you. And it's not even a case of "it works until you realize you're being lied to", because as soon as you realize one game lied to you, you will now come to the same conclusion about other games that much faster. Worse still, you'll start believing games are lying to you even when they aren't. If all games were always fair, this would never be a problem (at least not a real one, people claiming it's the game cheating would probably still be a thing because humans, lol)
This is honestly why I feel difficulty options for games should fully describe what they actually do. Because I don't want to start the game on hard because the AI may do things I consider cheap and unfair. However normal may have too many advantages still attached. One of my pet peeves is when difficulty actually controls the enemy count because I never want to be fighting less enemies, that's giving me less game, I just want an easier time fighting the enemies, I don't want every enemy to be capable on one-shotting me and every minor skirmish to be the equivalent of a game-ending life and death struggle worthy of a final battle. I can understand having to occasionally manipulate the odds in an XCOM, because at some point the hit has to be certain, but honestly I feel the rest of the time things should be left pretty 1:1 with no additional skewing. I mean you claim it's a necessary evil but the rubber-banding in racing games is one of the worst things ever. Nothing feels worse than being miles ahead, make one tiny mistake, and having everyone instantly pass you because the rubberband decided to rebound in that very moment. Rather than a rubber-band there should just be another difficulty level where the AI should simply be capable of using more of the car's potential. Till eventually there's a difficulty level that I can more or less keep pace with and occasionally surpass. At very lease there should be no rebound mechanic, the difficulty should determine the length of the rubber-band at best.
In command and conquer the game series, your structures need power, unless your the AI who often times will have base defenses function even if they have no powerplants. And they ignore the fog of war, on higher difficulties they can see your stealth but cant shoot it unless they have something with detection, the amount of times the enemy AI has attempted to crush my stealth units that they not know are there is a lot
I am not someone who plays games to maintain a sense of tension and excitement. I usually play them to wind down and relax. The last thing I want is for the AI to cheat in some manner to keep me in an elevated stress state.
One of my favorite examples of games lying to you is hitboxes! In a lot of games, enemy hitboxes will be much bigger than they appear, to make it easier to hit them. Conversely with the player's hurtbox, which is usually smaller to make it harder for enemies to hit you.
The one thing I absolutly disagree with is changing the difficulty based on performance, if I wanted the game to be easier I would have picked an easier difficutly, dont cheat me out of my acomplishments of beating something I died 100 times to
I appreciate the insight, thanks for your work! A couple of points - most of us know about the loading screen / animation being essentially a load bar and we don't mind; good example - when you fly from one star system to the next in No Man's Sky, you fly through a nicely animated wormhole tunnel, but we all know that the tunnel will only last for as long as it takes for the next starsystem to load in 😉 As for dropping the difficulty after a couple of fails by the player, seriously, nothing pisses me off more than a game notably lowering the difficulty becouse i failed a couple of times. It's like being a baby and trying to walk, then falling a couple of times and then the parents just give you a walker with wheels to walk around in so you stop crying. Part of growing up in life and gaming is failing a lot, overcoming your failings and becoming a stronger and better person / player. Seriously, don't do that or at least as non-notable as possible becouse this "helping" makes more serious players quit then it helps to retain imho. Not the casuals tho, but then again they don't tend to play the same game for a long time anyway.
7:56 Oh, no. I have very low self-esteem and self-worth, and internalize failure into who I am as a person, even if its just a game. Blaming myself for failure is the first thing I do, and I know for a fact I'm incapable of "getting güd". Which is why I prefer easy mode, or just don't even bother to attempt things that might be a challenge for me. I already know I'm a loser; I don't need a game to assure me of that. It's like when we played powerhouses in high school sports. We already know we can't win, why even bother showing up? Where's the pride in getting blown out on our home turf, 63-3?
I don't like _most_ games. I once considered myself a Gamer (capitol G) but... no longer. Sometime in my 30s I realized I was blasting through games, barely giving them a chance, and hating them all. It took me a long time to realize that it's because of the concepts you've illustrated here. I can _feel_ it when a game lies to me, and it feels _bad._ Now, I can only manage hard base-builders with self-imposed difficulty curves, such as Factorio and Oxygen Not Included, and simulation style games, to name a few. Sure, there's some conceits and some obvious manipulation, but if I don't play it _right,_ it all goes to hell, and I know that only I am to blame. I think a lot of this is due to the fact that LIFE is hard, and my JOB is hard, and I hate everything. I might need to see a therapist, but I'm fairly sure I'd hate that, too.
@@InsanoRider777 For real, This is why game devs can rarely be upfront with gamers. You give them some behind the scenes of how games work and they get up in arms over something they barely notice.
@@InsanoRider777 "Since the beginning" is almost certainly not true. That implies that RPGs on the Commodore 64 or TRS-80 used part of their valuable memory for this kind of "hand-holding" code. I would bet very good money that that is not true.
I'm not going to tell game devs what they should or shouldn't do, but I will say -I- don't like being lied to about things that, were I to find out, I would not like. Even without finding out, I don't like to have to worry about whether I beat a challenge because I personally improved, or the game just decided to "hand it to me on a silver platter", and would be very bothered were it to have done the latter. Regarding some other comments, I'd rather not accept "But what if you're lied to well enough that you never find out" either, because that could be used to justify just about any kind of lie. Some people are fine with the game lying to them about fundamental mechanics and game difficulty (and that is totally fine), I personally am not.
"Mario Party seeds rolls beforehand" Not true, at least not universally. If that were the case, then no amount of save abuse could change the rolls, but I've done that several times in various entries (single-player only of course) with decent success.
Sometimes it might be worth it to just tell the player straight up that you are adjusting the difficulty. A lot of people point to Resident Evil 4's dynamic difficulty as a sore spot, because they believe that the game *secretly* lowering the difficulty is treating them like a baby, like they aren't good enough and need the extra help. In reality, Resident Evil 4's system is no different than Smash Ultimate's Classic Mode, or Kid Icarus: Uprising, or God Hand. Those three games all have dynamic difficulty, too. The difference is that they put a meter on the screen, telling you exactly where it's set, and let you know that when you die, it'll go down. Playing at higher difficulties gives you better rewards, but comes with the risk of failure due to the increased challenge. Resident Evil 4 is the exact same, it just doesn't tell you where you are on the scale at any given time.
Yes, I have caught games lying to me, and it bothers me deeply every time. For example, I noticed how enemy aim suddenly gets way worse in some games when your health is critically low. Completely killed the feeling of success that comes from surviving a near defeat, because surviving that near defeat was not at all the same thing as surviving when I was doing well. It wasn't earned. And it also undermined the feeling of fairness of messing up in the first place, because that meant that relatively speaking, the game was trying harder to hurt me when I was doing better. Suddenly nothing felt earned or fair, and both success and failure no longer felt like they were in my hands as a player. My sense of agency was irreparably damaged. Or in games where ammo is usually in some sort of box or crate, such as Half-Life 2, I eventually realized that the amount and type of ammo in crates depends on how much ammo you currently have. In which case, why even try to be careful with resources? Use your resources well and the game will just "reward" you by getting stingier with ammo to negate your effort, leading to the same problem as when auto-adjusting difficulty making things harder when you're doing better: Instead of being rewarded for doing a better job with not having to worry about ammo or the game just plain feeling easier, you're getting punished with more challenge by doing better. That completely negates the point of doing better in the first place. Making the game easier is the entire payoff for getting gud. And on the opposite end of the dial, making the game easier when I'm struggling completely negates the ability to feel like I eventually succeeded, because if the problem got easier, then it's not really the problem I failed at in the first place. Succeeding where I failed before has effectively become impossible, because the point I failed before ceased to exist. There have absolutely been times I was not at all ready to throw in the towel and demand the game not ratchet things down, but nope, automatic difficulty adjustments decided I was probably getting frustrated and made that decision for me. And that sucks as much as being frustrated by things being too hard. So yeah, I say games should absolutely stop automatically adjusting difficulty. Making things easier or harder is fine in itself, I have no problem with people dialing in their personal challenge sweet spot, but should always be a choice in the player's hands. Don't make the game easier OR harder until I say I want things to be easier or harder. Until games can directly read my feelings straight from my brain, they'll never understand my personal level of optimal challenge more than I myself do. And as long as I'm ranting here, I get really tired of games only making things easier in the relatively easy parts. If I had a nickel for every time games were willing to make things easier when I didn't need or want it, I'd have soooo many nickels. Piles of them. But when it comes to a game's most hardcore super challenges? The times I'm well and truly sick of throwing myself at the wall and would gladly take a challenge reduction? Of course games NEVER EVER ratchet that challenge down. And say what you will, but if you ask me, that's wrong. If a game's gonna have variable difficulty, if the point is to make sure player of all skill levels are having a good time, then that should apply to the entire range of a game's content, optional super challenges and all. The peaks of the challenge graph are where lowered difficulty is probably needed the most, it makes the opposite of sense for those to be the only parts where difficulty can't be lowered.
Noticing fake faster movement: all the damn time. I'm speeding up because I want to spend less time holding the forward button, and when the time spent doing so doesn't change I would notice and get annoyed immediately, sometimes I even check to make sure the "sprint" isn't making me slower. I just attributed it to developer incompetence (as this is usually on small indie games), not that they were actually just fucking with me. Noticing "random" chances not being actually random: all the damn time. I'm a save-scummer so when I reload a 70% chance 15 times and still don't get it, I notice and get annoyed about having to load the thing 15 times. Noticing difficulty drops: usually. If it's a difficult game and I'm figuring out patterns of a boss and experimenting to see what I can get away with, it becomes much more apparent when suddenly the boss is standing around a lot more and I get annoyed waiting for it to attack so I can try out my counter-strategy. Strategy game AI cheats: obviously. Aside from the fact that most games nowadays blatantly state what advantages the AI gets on higher difficulties, when you're actually beating their door down and see a complete lack of infrastructure to support the amount of crap they were pumping out is a pretty obvious tell that they were pulling resources out of their ass.
Some games roll BEFORE you make decision to prevent save scumming. In some of them you might have just saved AFTER roll was done, but before you saw the effect.
I would hope that if the computational capacity can be afforded to it, I'd much rather have the npcs in fps games or 3rd person adventure titles to have that processing of actually searching instead of wallhacks and lying. Honestly i probably wouldn't notice the difference but it's definitely a more affirming satisfaction if i trick an npc or hide successfully that was deliberately trying to get to me instead of knowing where i eas exactly and then putting on a show.
I think a more interesting approach would be stage hazards. Like you’re going through a construction site and a gender falls down. It can try to balance the playing field and keep it interesting (being in first for 3 laps isn’t fun), but if you’re skilled and paying attention you can avoid it. So it’s not a guaranteed penalty.
When games cheat, and it's noticeable? I basically write the game off in that exact minute. I return them if I can, and I take down previously good reviews to leave negative ones. It feels like a con-artist trick basically 100% of the time, I think less of the devs who put this into their games...and assume they've always been doing this, even when it comes to advertising or other ethical consideration. In an age where games are ALSO manipulating for loot boxes and trying to lie during press cycles? Game devs don't get the benefit of the doubt; it always feels abusive, and it is never good.
Personally I hate it. When I play a game I assume that the rules are set and won't change. I don't want a game to become easier if I struggle, or harder if I'm good just to give me a false impression of success/failure. If you die 10 times against a boss and then the game turns easy mode on, you didn't beat the boss, the game let you win, like we let little kids win because they have no chance against adults ( and it's good for their moral and self-confidence ). If I carefully explore a level, save on ammo, stock everything in a chest, and then the game makes the enemies harder to kill because I have too much ammo, I feal cheated, all my efforts went in vain, I could have just ignored the ammo and enemies would be easier to kill. Changing the rules is bullshit.
An RTS/Strategy game from thirty years ago cheating is more understandable cause they didn't have the tech to make good AI that would fit on a PC. Nowadays, you can just program better AI
I think there should be a much greater degree of transparency in the adjustments made for gamefeel, for one it would teach potential developers how games actually operate while playing and for two I think way too many people have "protagonist of reality" syndrome. See: all the dummies who think summoning in elden ring (a core mechanic) is cheating.
My dear boy, I think you have discovered why souls likes are growing popular. Video games, by nature of what they are, train your pattern recognition. After you train your pattern recognition to a certain extent, you can see through the developer lies. After that, tension becomes anticlimax. Excitement turns to disgust. Victory rings hollow. Thus, when people like this find a souls like, they find a game that isn't lying to them. No matter how much pattern recognition they use, they can't find a single lie. They lost because they deserved to lose. And that brings an odd sense of satisfaction. The game tells them if you cannot get past this point with your skills and upgrades, then you don't deserve to. Players then find Souls likes to be honest and refreshing.
Every time i see a game cheat, i quit that game. It isnt fun. Especially for games with numerical stats. It feels better to absolutely body the AI than to have it cheat to make me struggle. Meanwhile if the game cheats to make the ai worse, thats un-earned victory, and i dont want it.
I remember Command and Conquer, where you could sandbag areas and block the AI. Once after i bled the AI dry i let a single harvester out, it ended up making units 4-5x the amount of credits one load would get.
I feel like your argument is that we should lie to players because they have stupid thoughts and can't handle the truth. But have you considered that maybe lying to players all the time is what led them to become brain-poisoned in the first place? I'd like to argue that constantly lying to players is bad not only for games but for human civilization as a whole tbh.
Part of being a game developer is protecting the players from themselves. All these comments going "I HATE BEING LIED TO. GIVE IT TO ME STRAIGHT" are lying to themselves. They'd throw their controllers in frustration and call the game cheap if the game was real with them. Everybody think they're hot shit and big boys until they miss their 12th shot in Xcom and rage quit with tears in their eyes.
I accuse people in general of being brain-poisoned by cheaty games, and your response is to say that they're crybabies. Maybe if XCOM wasn't actively encouraging people to internalize gambler's fallacies then there'd be fewer people dying destitute of gambling addictions.
I've noticed games lying to me, the RTS example really got to me and actually *did* get me to quit! A strong early game Civilisation game had me eye up my passive NPC neighbour with my relatively excellent army, only to walk straight into instantly-spawned units. It felt and still feels wrong, being 'punished' for aggressive tactices. Lying to the player is often a good thing, but you must be *damn* sure you won't be caught out doing so or your entire world falls apart and we're aware it's all smoke and mirrors behind the screen.
I've always noticed the rubber banding in any racing game. N64 Pod-racing was especially bad at hiding it, for one example. Fed up with it at a young age, I've had zero interest in any racing game ever since.
Sometimes if a game is being too punishing or annoying I just stop playing and watch to see what the game does when the player stops moving. It's really telling when you have these mobs waiting around for you to react.
When I found out about the Xcom lie, it did change the game for me, I stopped even looking at the percentage and just treated every shot as a coin flip. I think some people would really be put off by it.
I like my games to be honest with me, but maybe I'm just old-school like that. Why are there soulslikes plastered all over this video? Souls games seem to be completely honest with you.
It's most videos. Starting to feel like it's all he plays. The b roll is either a soulslike, Hollow Knight, or a recent Triple A trailer. Oh, or Disco Elysium.
Too many video essays shove in any game footage as random B-roll to keep you engaged, rather than because it’s a relevant example. Part of it is trying to shorten time making the video by grabbing any random footage (especially if it’s a weekly video). And the other part is not really caring. Essentially treating videos as audio logs while bemoaning that they can’t have a black screen, otherwise people would probably leave. It’s kind of a lie in and of itself, that it’s there for a purpose relating to the argument when it could have been almost anything else.
This is part of why I prefer boardgames, sorry :) If I play Aeon Trespass and I miss on 1-4 and hit on 5-10, thats what i do. No hidden adjustments, no hidden systems, I know exactly whats up. And if I miss 4 times in a row, tough luck. Board games do just fine without all these wacky systems game designers believe are needed. Some videogame lies are fine to me - like the famous coyote jump - but the stuff like difficulty settings via cheating or fake probabilities are where I outright check out.
Wow, I didn't expect this video to unironically advocate for Sid Meiering, i.e. "rolling actually low RNG is undesirable because it makes players feel bad". Should we allow players to learn what true randomness is, which is a really valuable skill not only in games but countless other aspects of real life? No, of course not, we should always coddle them like little babies. I don't understand why a game making itself harder for skilled players would "feel more like actual lying". That kind of dynamic difficulty, that rewards skilled players with even more content and challenge, is one of the most fascinating and least explored aspects of difficulty that I know of. Personally, I think this type of game design mentality is really toxic and irresponsible. Believe it or not, many players can take accountability with their own mistakes and are deserving of the respect of not being treated as babies. Some of the hardest games ever made, like Ikaruga, DoDonPachi Dai-Ou-Jou and Ninja Gaiden 2 are all perfectly honest about their difficulty without feeling the need to lie to the player.
If randomness cannot be both fun and honest, then it shouldn't be a gameplay element. Unless the game is about deception, then it can be allowed, but even then it needs to be honest about it's deception, because a game about deception isn't about being deceived, it is about figuring out how you're being deceived.
_"Some of the hardest games ever made, like Ikaruga, DoDonPachi Dai-Ou-Jou and Ninja Gaiden 2 are all perfectly honest about their difficulty without feeling the need to lie to the player."_ And they're niche titles, because very few people enjoy them.
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
Lying can be good, but it's not always appropriate and players realizing they were lied to can sour the experience, even retroactively. So it's still a technique that should be used with care, and probably is at it's most effective at the very beginning of the experience.
And here I was thinking that I fall back on old strategy games so often because I'm just a nostalgic old fart. Now I'm wondering if it's because TBS nowadays, though on the surface is providing me a bit of mind crack, is causing my brain to rebel on some level to the saccharine "you're amazing" message they're trying to feed me by manipulating the odds.
Not only that, but when players become more savvy, they'll likely stop actually thinking of certain situations as "natural" (essentially the Game Dev who cried low health). If you realize a BUNCH of games you play use "gradient health", you'll just start taking that into account, inevitably meaning when your playing a game and manage to SQUEAK out a win on a game where the bar is accurate, meaning it was a genuine life or death situation, you might just go "10%? Eh, prob was more 30-40% anyway." And I heard that gears of war along with "low clip magic bullets", also made it so new Multiplayers were actually given a bonus to kill easier, imagine if you knew that's how it worked in a MP match, suddenly the "how did that kill me?" has an answer other then "your bad that's how" which is "noob damage bonus" and I guarantee you 99% of players will blame the latter 99% of the time.
@@murasaki848 They were lying to you back then as well. What the video is talking about isn't anything new like he said with arcade games.
Devs today are just much better at hiding it despite games were they obviously aren't.
Yeah, I now feel like any hard boss fight I've beaten over the years has just been spoon fed to me after failing too much.
Okay, granted, I just found this video and I don't have the time to currently watch this, but the comments are kinda flux and I saw this one and wanted to leave a response.
But if you think you need to lie, then why not just fix the system so it doesn't need to fake it to make it essentially? Alright, I can imagine not fixing the numbers on say a roll to hit, or whatever, but outside of genuine player misconception of say chances/odds, I can't imagine a time when iterating on the system you're lying in wouldn't result in a 'fairer' system.
Like one of the comments here talking about balatro, I haven't played it, but says its truly random, i.e doesn't tweak the odds, I think thats fine, but if there was a reason to 'fix' the system, then just add a caveat that after so many hands it the effect or whatever triggers for sure, and spice it up by increasing the odds as you get closer to that promised trigger if you really want or don't and make sure the player doesn't get lucky breaks?
Anyways I guess I want to know what other people think and or if the video goes into detail on this specific field of the topic (idea of iterating the idea to play more fair from the player's perspective while still staying accurate)
This exact thing happened to my dad. He's always loved the Civilization games, and played them a fair bit. He had gotten to the point he was trying the hardest difficulty on Civ 2 or 3, but he quit, as one of his computer opponents rolled out a tank extremely early in the game. Once he knew the AI just cheated, he stopped enjoying those harder difficulties, as it was no longer a fair contest. I feel the same way in games like Stellaris, I don't mind a challenge, but when your AI opponents literally just cheat it can start to feel unfair.
That was always a problem in ALL the Sid Meyer games... they couldn't do decent AI so they cheated.
you are still overcoming a set challenge. It's no different than having handicap in gold or something.
@@bemusedalligator If one person is climbing a staircase while another is teleporting to the top it no longer is a set challenge. It now is about beating the AI no matter what it does, which can be fun for some and annoying to another.
@@bemusedalligator It is very different. If you can't trust what you see, then all your strategies and tactics become meaningless. Why try to reduce the enemy's production if they can just spawn in units? Why try to be first in a race if the moment you're first the other racers get specific attacks that target the first racer? It makes every choice you've made meaningless, and I get enough of that in real life, thank you very much.
@@arkturhellsing1484 It just means, even if you got gud, you still need to git gudder. A tank is not going to roll out "extremely early" in the game -- the A.I. will move through the tech tree swiftly, but not *that* swiftly. Sounds to me like "extremely early" in this case just means faster than the OP's dad could get there.
I know for a fact that Balatro tells the truth about the Wheel of Fortune's chance of success *because* it never feels like it's fair.
But what if they dont? maybe they tinker with the odds specificly so it feels unfair?! wouldnt want the player to get a winstreak
@@metholuscaedes6794 I've had three wheels proc in a row, and sixteen NOPE!s in a row. It's definitely true random
@@metholuscaedes6794 The dev has confirmed that he doesn't balance any random chance mechanics in the game because he believes it shines its brightest in the hands of true randomness
I think there's a seed factor where the overall odds *are* one in four; but they're really distributed more heavily in one session than in others; to give more the sensation that you're really lucky or really unlucky; which are both significantly more "interesting" and engaging to the player experience than a simple per-use basis. Like, what if it's one out of two seeds that gives you a one out of two chance (this is the 25% it alludes to), and the OTHER seeds give you a one out of ten instead?
@@TonyTheTGR then you throw in the green die and stuff gets bonkers
I forget which game it was, but there was a situation where I died repeatedly, and then the difficulty plummeted. I don’t think there was anything more demoralizing than that situation. Catching a game in its lie can be misery but not realizing the game is lying can really sell exhilaration to the player.
True, its better to have the game ask to reduce difficulty then get caught doing it
In Amnesia: The Dark Descent, if you die repeatedly to an enemy the enemy will stop showing up.
You can just *feel* the patronizing hand of the developer patting you on the head and saying, "We know you're incompetent, but we'd like you to see the rest of the game, so..."
I swear I failed a mission one time in RE4 and then the game switched itself to baby mode... So demoralizing 😭
I remember when I first played RE4 and I died in the infamous water room to the point where it removed the crossbow ganados on the overhead balconies. I was so insulted by this that I immediately reset my game and tried again until I got it.
Roses are Red
Chocolate is delectable
Easy Mode is now selectable.
Here's the thing. The moment I catch a game lying to me about information I need to make decisions is the moment I start referencing the wiki instead of trusting the game.
Yup and when I HAVE to go to an external source to get anything functional out of the game, that's bad design... mind you, I'm a guide follower in general because too many games, too little time in my life. The difference is when the game FORCES it because of unclear or inaccurate information
So you check the wiki when you realize the dice rolls in BG3 or Xcom aren’t *actually* random?
@@e-man7418 The dice rolls in BG3 ARE actually random unless you turn on the specific feature in the settings to make them less random, which I think the vast vast majority of players turned off.
@@Sotanaht01
Doubt, plus XCom, and every other random game that have a random mechanic you check the wiki to see if it's fixed somehow?
This is actually a huge issue with D&D. Lots of DMs will cheat, thinking the game will be better if they bend the rules and push for whatever outcome they want. Everyone thinks they're very subtle when they do it and it makes me unable to enjoy the game every time.
Rubber banding in racing games doesn't make the race feel more thrilling to me, it just feels like the ai is cheating and makes me enjoy the genre less.
I feel the same way about stealth games where it's incredibly obvious that the enemies know exactly where you're hiding and will beeline for you.
Same, this is something I personally hate
The big issue there is how obvious and well known it is. It isn't a deception. You aren't deceived. Telling your girlfriend that a dress doesn't make her look fat only works if she doesn't know you think she looks fat.
Agreed. I despise deceptive and cheat-like mechanics that artificially manufacture tension. If a game can't create tension organically, then it is poorly designed (in that area).
There are only 2 ways to balance racing games:
1 realisti where all cars have their fixed performace
2Arcade where the AI is cheating jast to catch up with players or wait for the slow ones.
Its not surprising the realistic one is used in sim games.
I think any sort of "behind the scenes difficulty adjustments" should be opt-in / opt-out.
I'm the kind of moron that will gleefully throw myself against a brick wall over and over to try to break it down, and I'd be unbelievably upset if I found out that, in-between sessions of leaping face-first into said wall, someone replaced the bricks with cardboard, robbing me of the feeling of satisfaction that would normally come with clearing such a hurdle.
To give an example: I've done a level 1 playthrough of Elden Ring, and forcing myself to find solutions to extremely tough problems was very rewarding to me. New strategies to employ, weaknesses to exploit, loadouts to make use of, etc... it all felt really dang good. If I had then been told that "oh, we made the fights a bit easier for you since you seemed to be dying a lot," I'd feel cheated out of a victory that I'd worked very hard to achieve.
Here's what happens if you give player the option. They turn it off, get completely bodied, get frustrated because of a bad experience, and then turn it back on, and then feel patronized because they know the helping hand is on.
Part of a game developers job is to protect the players from themselves. Because like he said in the videos, gamers, including him, are idiots. Plus, you're sort of describing difficulty levels.
But consider this: Is the problem not that the game secretly assisted you, but that it was caught doing so? If you found out right now that Elden ring had indeed done that, you'd be presumably upset. But if you never found out, you'd feel just as good as if you'd done it legitimately. Perhaps you'd even feel better with the assist if you thought your skill was higher than it really is.
It's just a thought experiment. Obviously, implementing secret assists that are easily spotted is the worst case and the problem most people have with this.
You could also adjust your goals to be more like "I want to see how far I can get without dying".
Shmups like Raiden and Gradius adjust difficulty based on how well you're doing and how many power-ups you have, but scale it back down when you die even at the highest difficulties because if you lose your power-ups, you certainly can't be expected to survive what it's throwing at you WITHOUT that extra firepower.
The way players have adjusted to this over the years is doing 1cc or no-hit runs, which will naturally max out the difficulty in the systems as designed by the devs.
In the fringe cases where people find a game too easy or dislike having mechanics that help them when they struggle, the best response may simply be to "git gud" and self-impose challenges for your exceptional skill.
The devs can absolutely add things to make it harder (Hades is a masterclass in difficulty, ij my opinion) but it wouldn't hurt to develop the skill of finding your own fun.
I've noticed that happening in games before because I'll sometimes mess around with a boss a couple times, not expecting to win, just to get a feel for it or have some fun. Maybe I'll just see how long I can survive without attacking as I get used to avoiding and learning the attacks. Or maybe I try to fight the boss with some kind of joke weapon. And then when I've had my fill and fight it for real, it's hilariously easy because the game thinks I'm incompetent.
@@straysheep4467 But in shmups dynamic difficulty is part of the game loop: you're expected to start from scratch over and over, so it adjusts across a single run and resets for the next one. It's done specifically to push you to the 1cc, even if players think they're attempting it out of their own volition. Now imagine if failing hard at one run made the next one easier and you got a cheap 1cc: you'd feel cheated if you noticed. Well, that's what happens in longer games that silently adjust difficulty on game over.
In my personal experience, there's a big downside to this "lie" if a player finds out about the lie.
If the player realizes that the game has an invisible helping hand to aid the player, it can make them doubt whether any achievement is properly earned or not.
This can lead to said player discrediting themselves for any achievement in the game, feeling hollow victory, and forcing themselves to crank up the difficulty way above what's usually comfortable for them, just to "compensate for the game's invisible helping hand"
Once they do, it can lead to player frustration or even worse, outright quitting the game.
It's a tough thing to balance, and I'm sure that the benefit greatly outweighs the downside, but the downside still exists nonetheless, at least from my personal experience.
For sure. Just like any aspect of a game if you get it wrong the consequences can be severe, and it's always important to keep that in mind and not rely too heavily on established conventions.
Yep, the moment you notice the trickery, nothing feels earned or fair anymore. Success feels like it was handed to you for doing poorly, failure seems like an unfair punishment for doing too well, all player agency is lost in all outcomes. Which is why I think that automatically adjusting difficulty should ALWAYS be optional.
The type of lie matters a lot to me. If it's just framing and not a mechanical difference, like the gradated health bars, I don't mind too much. It can be annoying if you're trying to work out something technical and precise, but it's not usually a big issue for normal play. But the things that change the difficulty of the game really just kill it for me.
The rubber banding in racing games, whether it works 'for' or 'against' the player is a good example because it is so obvious. The moment I see that I lose interest.
I usually don't like leaving YT comments since the comment section isn't a fertile ground for discussion, but this notion of developers lying to players REALLY gets my knickers in a twist, so here we go.
As I see it, there are two separate ideas contained in this video: Fake Choices, and Curated Conditions.
*Fake Choices:* This is when a game presents you with a seemingly meaningful choice, but in reality the outcomes are more limited that you would otherwise believe. Most commonly seen in dialogue where NPC's will use a single reply for multiple distinct dialogue choices. Referred to as "Divergences" at 7:07 (if I'm understanding correctly anyway).
*Curated Experiences:* This is when a game secretly manipulates information and mechanics to produce a desired experience in the player. Enemy AI being subtly made easier to help a struggling player is the obvious example.
These are similar things that usually go hand in hand, but not always. The example of NPC's using the same dialogue to respond to multiple seemingly unique dialogue options is an example of Fake Choices being used to produce a Curated Experience. That Curated Experience being a natural feeling conversation with an NPC. However, the example of Enemy AI getting easier to help a struggling player doesn't present any Fake Choice. It is simply the game reacting to the players actions and reacting as programmed. Basically, Fake Choice is always in the purpose of a Curated Experience, but you can have Curated Experiences without Fake Choices.
*On fake choices:* Games are a medium entirely based on player choice and agency. The outcome of the simplest game, Pong, is decided by the players inputs and decision making (and probably some RNG, but that isn't relevant). This is the primary (and unique!) selling point of games compared to other forms of entertainment. If Pong reflected the ball back at your opponent no matter where your "bat(?)" was, then why would you bother playing? You'd be having no real impact, no real say in the events unfolding. You'd be a passive observer fooled into thinking they're an active participant. Fake Choices undercut the selling point and (for lack of a better word) heart of games; Interactivity. When unnoticed they give an illusion of depth, wide spanning content, and replayability, but when noticed, they shatter verisimilitude and invalidate what the player previously believed were decisions, no matter how small. So, why do Fake Choices emerge? I believe the main contributor is the developer setting a scope that is too wide. The developer sets their scope for realistic dialogues with NPCs that have tons of choices, but because they don't have the needed resources to create unique lines for every option, they _settle_ for a Fake Choice to trick the player. It's a short cut. Thus, I believe that Fake Choices can be solved by a narrowing of scope (assuming getting more resources isn't an option). Narrow the scope to the point where you don't need to cut corners and present the players with a Fake Choice. How a developer does this is up to them obviously. Less choices? Simpler wording? Cut dialogue completely?
As an example of a narrowing of scope, look at the Souls Series. There's a "talk" button. They reduced their dialogue with NPC's to the absolute minimum it can be, because it didn't _need_ to be any more than that. They cut the fat.
As a note, I want to add that not all Fake Choices are bad. For example, imagine a dialogue scene in an RPG with an ally who has been possessed by a demon, and you're presented with the following options: (1) Urge ally to fight back against the demon, (2) Demand the demon release your ally, (3) Ask what the demon wants. No matter what you choose, the demon immediately attacks. You kill the demon and later discover that the demon possessed your ally specifically because it wanted to kill you. In this case, the players dialogue choice don't matter, but this 'Fakeness' is consistent with the world presented by the game. It is not the developer cutting corners. In other words, *The World* is presenting you with a "Fake Choice" only because you lack the in-universe knowledge to know it is a fake choice, not because *The Developer* actively lying to you. This is fine and players who recognise such a "Fake Choice" will feel intelligent. No one will feel intelligent when they realise that your dialogue choices don't matter in some parts of Persona, just disappointed.
*On Curated Experiences:* I think this part of the discussion is subjective. How much different players are comfortable with is individual. Based on the video, you sound like you're okay with them. However, I don't like them. I hate being manipulated, because it feels like an insult to my intelligence. If you want me to reliably end up in that _Critical Health_ state to make me excited, make the math and the mechanics produce that effect. Now this doesn't mean I don't like compensation mechanics. Getting a stacking "+2% chance to hit" buff every time you miss is a perfectly functional way to stop players from getting shafted by chance. I just don't like that it's hidden.
As a final thought, lowering the difficulty in response to a failing player is frankly insulting and demeaning. LET ME GET MY ASS KICKED. Not everyone needs to be able to complete every game. It's okay for the hero to fail in their quest to save the princess.
Anyway good video, but I heavily disagree with the ideas presented.
You put into words a feeling I was trying to express. It's too simple to say "it's the devs being lazy" because there's no guarantee that- without these lies- the game would have been designed better.
However, you bring up lots of good examples of the nuance behind that broad idea, and where the feeling originates from. In a way, being forced not to lie, or to reduce scope to the bare essentials, seems to go hand in hand with a better designed game.
I believe there are times that a game really will need to lie to the player. But I also believe those lies can be revealed in an organic way to still allow players to enjoy the game. Would the concept of a buff called 'rally' that makes your chance to hit increase in xcom, whenever you miss a few times in a row, suddenly reduce a player's enjoyment over just hiding that mechanic? It would be hard to convince me that the people who enjoy xcom would have just not enjoyed it if the devs just presented that tidbit organically.
Self Serving Bias: I saw a study were people were playing Monopoly and one person was given an extra $2,000 at the start of the game. They won easily, because of course they did, but they all still said they won because of skill and the extra money had nothing to do with it.
Yep. It's really funny how even in a game where it's basically entirely luck, people still attribute skill as their reason for winning.
just like in real life : every millionaire is talented and poor people are obviously lazy... the game is still played a century later, but so many people still don't get the message
@@armelior4610 Well that's the message of the study. The message of the game is that laissez-faire capitalism is inherently flawed because it makes monopolies an inevitability and not just a possibility.
That's just called capitalism
sounds a lot like capitalists in real life
As someone who greatly cares about challenge in games, I absolutely despise dynamic difficulty adjustment. Don't quietly lower the difficulty for me when I am struggling, please. You're actually taking away what I want. It's especially insulting if it's dynamic difficulty adjustment in a game that has selectable difficulty settings.
Agreed, I think the difficulty should only shift upwards without asking the player. In my experience dynamic difficulty works best with relatively short games with limited lives, such as bullet hell shmups like Ikaruga or ZeroRanger.
@@Bluesine_R based God Hand
Throbbers are at least handy because a static screen is indistinguishable from a frozen game. At least it's a reminder that the game is still doing something and in cases where a game has frozen or crashed is a sign that closing it down now might be the best thing to do.
I recall a time before Throbbers were common place and as a child you'd just sit there and wonder if the game was ACTUALLY loading or if it was time to pull the cartridge out and blow on it.
Simulation gamers on PC can not relate, seriously this is a pure luxury reserved for Non Ram intensive games...
Throbbers are annoying things that don't tell me anything, at least loading bars tell me how far we've gone in our journey to begin playing the game.
@@CuteSkyler If something is supposed to only take a few seconds at most, a throbber is fine.
But if a process is found to take more than 10 seconds during testing... slap a loading bar on it.
@@sirjmo Source game loading is probably the worst one.
Extra credits did an episode about automatically lowering the difficulty forever ago. They made the very valid point that the risk of the player finding out they were cheated out of a proper challenge can far outweigh the advantage of preventing them from getting frustrated. In the year 2024, it's no longer a risk but an inevitably. XCOM always felt like psuedo randomness, but the confirmation does retroactively sour my experience of the game. Simply not capping the hit chance would have gone a long way to reducing frustration without having to rig the dice.
Back in Amnesia: Dark Descent, a buddy and I were having fun playing through the game, and I made a joke of rushing one of the monster. After a swift defeat, the checkpoint was nearby and I joked "Time for round 2!" and charged again. Instead of killing the character again, the monster faded. It kind of made us realize the monsters were there to scare us as we progressed, not stop progression.
Game Devs Lying to Me isn't A Good Thing, Actually ; A Player's Rebuke (WARNING : long. TL;DR at bottom.)
-Do loading bars REALLY count as lying if they're industry standard across the entire UI industry? Also, like you said, they serve the important purpose of telling the player the game isn't frozen. On higher-end machines this is less of an issue but back when I had a very low-end PC that would freeze constantly, that information was vital. The devs weren't lying to me when they were telling me the application was still running, and that's what mattered.
-Health bars being unreliable, both mine and the enemies', is the exact reason why I'm always forced to turn on damage numbers in just about everything and I'm honestly sick of it. They're obnoxious, they clash with the artstyle, they rarely match the HUD, they're massively non-diegetic, but they're the only damn thing I can rely on. If I'm counting my shots because I don't have loads of ammo and I need to know exactly how many it'll take me to take down the enemy, or I'm in a fighting game and I see the enemy has a certain amount of health left, I can't rely on some wacky variable length bar for that info, I gotta count MaxEnemyHealth/ShotDamage or use that combo I labbed that does exactly that much damage, combo scaling included, or maybe a little more. Conversely, if you slap a big red obscuring vignette over my HUD when I'm at "low health", and especially if I'm actually fine, I'm gonna get angry, because that's the EXACT time I need to calm down, focus and get as much info as possible to survive, not "be in an adrenal state of panic". If I'm about to die, I need to IMMEDIATELY spot where the threat is from, what they're doing and which direction they're going, and indirectly reducing my FOV is the exact opposite of helping. I can tell I'm low health because A) I see the number on my HUD and B) good sound design lets me know before I even have to move my eyes, and I can get in an "adrenal state of panic" by myself when I'm at low health just fine, I don't need the game helping me on that one.
-A lot of people have already mentioned it, but yeah, adaptive difficulty is more of a slap in the face. "Oh, is the widdle gamew too skiww issued to pway on the highew difficuwties? That's okay baby, wet's take you down to something mowe youw speed." If you're in a low difficulty and are breezing through, it's fine to gradually up the stakes until the player finds their sweet spot, but the players that instalock high difficulties are the very kind of people who don't mind dying over and over, and HATE being coddled above all else. Even just going "You've died a lot of times! Do you want to lower the difficulty?" is also insulting and only tilts the player more. In a similar vein, in something like PvE online multiplayer public instances, if a new player can select a higher difficulty with only the starting gear, either you make damn sure the starting gear can keep up or you lock them out of it entirely! They won't be able to carry their weight through no fault of their own, their teammates will have to carry them and lose out on an extra gun/sword/whatever, the newbie will feel useless, that's a recipe for a quitting newbie and some pissed off vets! (Looking at you, Helldivers 2, among many, MANY others.)
-You THINK we don't see AI cheating. We do. Every time. It shows. STOP IT. Either develop better AI (tall order, I'm aware) or design the game around that limitation. I forget which game, some sci-fi PvE RTS I think, but I recall selecting its highest difficulty had the devs prompting the player to send them whatever non-cheese strat they found to win the game so they could patch it out, because the expectation was, upfront, that the AI would be cheating its ass off and you weren't really expected to win. THAT, I'm okay with (because it wasn't a lie, it was told upfront). The OG Dooms also told you that Nightmare was "Not Even Remotely Fair". Rubberbanding, wallhacking, odds tweaking, resource boosting, if you do that under the table, the player can (rightfully) blame the game and quit in disgust BECAUSE THEY WILL NOTICE IT. If you tell them from the start, it becomes part of the challenge; either the player seeks it out on their own or they drop back down a difficulty notch (this is how you incite the majority of your players to play on Normal, if you balanced your game around that difficulty, btw). STOP LYING. Players are okay with more than you think, if you tell them.
-Random chance is a fickle thing to balance, I'm aware, but there are ways to avoid lying. BG3's Karmic Dice solve that elegantly, IMO. Turn them on and you get that doctored chance you mentioned, turn them off and you get the raw RNG experience. The player is given a CHOICE, not forced to accept skewed odds, even if in their own favor. Oh, and regarding that 10-miss streak on a 95% to-hit, that's 0.05^10=0.00000000000009765625 (9.765625 × 10^-14), or 0.000000000009765625%. That is about a BILLIONTH of a percent. To have something like this happen, you must have some SERIOUSLY rotten luck. If THIS scenario happens more than a single-digit number of times on the entirety of the planet, there's something seriously wrong with *YOUR* RNG, not the player's perception of it. Luck _that_ bad is something you brag about, not regularly experience.
-Again, if you tell people upfront, they'll be okay with more than you think. You'll never make a game for everyone. Find your target demo, analyze their wants, then build the experience around that. Animal Crossing doesn't need adaptive difficulty, neither does Elden Ring. They cater to certain playerbases that want certain things out of their games and don't need difficulty tweaking in the background, for perfectly opposite reasons. And those games sold gangbusters. To me, adaptive difficulty is just casting too big a net and shows a lack of commitment. "Oh, was that too hard? I'm sorry, let's make it a bit easier for you. Oh, was that too easy? I'm sorry, let's make it a bit more challenging." Completely muddies the very idea of a challenge. It's like playing tag with someone who will both sprint full tilt away from you and do that slow fake run, they're just being an ass. Pick a lane.
*TL;DR* : No, honesty is the better policy, more often than not. There is a market for unreasonably hard games, and for ridiculously easy games. The former attract a playerbase that at best tolerates the presence of lower difficulties, and the latter attract a playerbase that doesn't want to be told the game could be harder. If your game falls somewhere inbetween, design for THAT difficulty level, don't cater to everyone. You'll always, ALWAYS have people going "ooh this was so easy" and "waah this is way too hard", no matter how many tricks you pull. You brought up "self-serving bias", I retort "squeaky wheel principle". Those who find the difficulty "just right" rarely go on forums and say "yeah the difficulty was just perfect for me". This attitude of "there's a little something for everyone" is, in my opinion, the exact thing killing most AAA games of late : "can't possibly risk alienating anyone from our game! we've spent far too much money to risk a flop!" and then of course it flops because a game for everyone is a game for no one.
The only games where I've seen adaptive difficulty actually work really well is in bullet hell shmups like Ikaruga, DoDonPachi DOJ and ZeroRanger. If the player performs well, the difficulty starts to increase, new and different enemy waves will spawn and bosses will have entirely new attacks. If the player dies, then the difficulty goes down, but since the player has a very limited amount of lives, and the goal of the game is to beat the whole game with one credit (1CC), the player can't abuse the dynamic difficulty by killing themselves repeatedly to make the game easier like in RE4 for example.
Appreciated the wall of text warning, lol. That much text is annoying to scroll past on mobile if I expand it instead of open the thread.
I cannot like this enough. I was trying to make a similar post as I went through the video but yours is so much better.
Well written, kudos!👍
@@Bluesine_R It's less bad, but I think it's still very bad. Adapting the difficulty down if you fail your 1cc means you cannot practice against the later stage high difficulty stuff. You either have a successful 1cc or play on easy mode, no practice. It would be better to just have difficulties selected from the start, if you play nightmare mode you get nightmare mode difficulty all the way through.
You can argue that's the point, you're not supposed to be able to practice against the final bosses high difficulty moves, you only get one shot at it each time you manage to perfect the whole game. It's just like playing a hard bossfight with 13 phases and no checkpoints. To which I would say screw you I'm not playing that crap.
I'm going to agree with the comments saying that the moment the player becomes aware they're being lied to, it's bad. I'm confident that games have successfully lied to me before, but I don't know of many times where I realized it and felt better about the experience. Suddenly having an easier section of the game that I've been dying to, or becoming aware of Karmic Dice, or Undertale's health bar gradient making it impossible to actually determine your health from a quick glance...they're bad. It's a risk developers take when they code in lying (which does have to happen to an extent, I'm aware) but it has to be hidden for it to not feel cheap to the player, in one way or the other.
There's a lot of people rightfully pointing out that they don't want adaptive difficulty turning down the challenge of their game, so I'll note that the opposite is also desireable.
If I'm the kind of person who, when presented with a theoretical 5 difficulty options, selects the second-to-hardest, or third-hardest if given 7 options (can't remember a game going that granular before, though), then I've likely found that to be a fun level of challenge for me through experience. Like, whenever I replay Dead Space 2, as a personal example, the difficulty above Normal feels pleasantly balanced for how I like things, with the one after being only good for if I want to task myself.
If the game decides to go "Way to go, champ! Let's crank things up and see how good you can get!", when I wanted a consistent experience to measure my own skills against, then I'm just going to be temporarily frustrated that the game is set to a higher difficulty. Then, I'm still going to be worried about the game going *too low* of a difficulty, because I'm rarely going to always perform at Hard But Not Very Hard skill during a play session.
I remember coming up against this problem with Guilty Gear Xrd Rev2, actually; the Arcade mode (or whatever the mode where you play 10 matches and then get a story snippet is called) constantly adjusts the difficulty up and down based on wins and losses, and it's so easy to go from "mechanically satisfying opponent AI" to "fight-stick-reading digital bastard" and back again because of this. It puts a monstrous chip on me hard-but-not-very-hard-shoulder.
Movement speed is also a peeve for me. The original Mass Effect basically had Shepard pretend to sprint at a walking pace, with a zoomed in camera. This isn't slick, it's lame, it might as well add speed lines to the walking animation, and I wanted to throttle the Bioware team one-by-one when I figured this out. Which, if I wasn't prickly about it, I would've figured out with the Remastered trilogy where they made the sprint absurdly effective.
So what you're saying is that when we use the excuse that "The game cheated" we are in fact correct. Good to know.
Yup. Exactly counter to the video's point. If the game can make itself easier to allow you to progress, why can't it make itself effectively impossible to beat to "build tension"?
Dying/burning a bunch of resources means nothing. The game wanted to take that stuff away from you, so it turned the difficulty up to 11 to get it done. Once it was finished, it went back to creampuff mode so you'd feel "accomplished" for overcoming something so difficult.
@@nonyabidness8676 Yep, I wish there was a consistent mod or something for REmake 2, killing a zombie in 3 shots than suddenly when you did your part and saved a lot of ammo by dodging or ignoring enemies, the next zombie took 7 shots just felt frustrating.
This video shouldn't have spoken so absolutely about what players "really" want, and it shouldn't have used background footage from games that weren't specifically covered in the video. Does Dark Souls have adaptive difficulty? Does it have logarithmic health bars? I don't know, but you're playing footage from it.
I just played Resident Evil 8 in VR, after several regular playthroughs I've done in the past. I know how RE lies to the player, so I liked that I beat Standard difficulty without ever dying. But if I play on Hard, I sure as hell should be dying. If I had never played the game before, I sure as hell should be dying. I got stuck on one room in Uncharted 4 for two hours, because that game WASN'T lying, and now I can be proud that I beat that BS Crushing difficulty.
About hit chances, I play Fire Emblem. FE lies to the player, using two random numbers instead of one to reinforce likely hits and likely misses. I know that, and I'm glad I do! My preference is to know when a game is lying to me, because then I know the game is working with me to have fun. If these systems are lurking in secret, then I have to wonder whether my experience is what I actually want or if I'm being fed a fixed rollercoaster that I didn’t ask for.
Dark Souls doesn't have adaptive difficulty or logarithmic health bars, and either of those features would be awful to have in that game. Adaptive difficulty would ruin the feeling of overcoming a fair challenge, and logarithmic health bars would make it needlessly difficult for the player to make decisions around their and their opponent's health levels. Definitely a questionable choice of B-roll footage.
Your video had two of the primary examples of games I refuse to play anymore:
- Mario Party
- Mario Kart
After years of eating blue shells and lightning bolts, I just don't have patience for being punished for being good at the game anymore. I'll play other non-Mario kart games, assuming they don't pull the same shenanigans, but I won't touch Mario Kart.
Same with Mario Party. I *always* make the mistake of playing to win, and wind up losing to the guy that's comfortable with sandbagging until the final turns. I still remember the last time I played, and I knew the moment I was screwed was when the game gave me a push into the lead, but there were clearly too many turns remaining to maintain my position until the end. The game then proceeded to hold me down and ransack my coins and stars, until I was firmly in last place.
I also remember the point where I checked out from Resident Evil 4. I was trying to figure out how to clear the reflecting pool room, and I noticed that the crossbow guards on the elevated platforms disappeared after a couple of attempts. What was an exciting encounter that I was trying to puzzle out became a boring little stroll as the enemies formed a conga line and charged me.
So, no. I hate being lied to. I hate sandbagging being rewarded. I hate having the majority of my characters' health concentrated in the final portion of their health bar.
This reminds of me of the kerfuffle with Anthem where players realized the damage numbers were meaningless, that the best gun was the default one as it actually killed in less shots than the legendary ones.
In anthems....defense? It was also a game that had a significant amount of problems because of horrendous mismanagement. I doubt they were even thinking of balance or anything like that when they had PR people going "we've been developing this game for over two years now" and the devs sitting by and going "wait....what? since when?"
Logarithmic health bars combined with damage indicators that make the whole screen go red/grey absolutely ruin a game. I don’t want to spend the whole game in grayscale, listening to a throbbing heartbeat. In fact, I’d prefer if that never happened.
That health bar inconsistency sounds SO horrible. It means you don't know how much health you actually have. Which is just basic information. It's like you're playing chess on a computer and sometimes your pieces can move differently. Like how... what caused that? And it's just impossible to know. But it's a basic rule that you NEED to know.
I get it when the health bar is fudged for narrative reasons, to make the player feel close to death or hide that a sequence is actually just a victory lap. But that only works if it's done sporadically: When the entire game runs on a non-linear health bar, it's just annoying.
Bioshock makes enemies that you don't see fire slower and aim worse. As a veteran FPS player, I always try to keep the enemies in my vision, which in this case makes them harder than they are supposed to be.
In Bayonetta, enemies outside of your current camera view also attack slower and move slower towards you. It's used in higher level play to split the enemies for a more favorable outcome.
In games that feature "sniper" enemies, they are often hard-coded to miss their first shot to ensure that players know they're there so they can plan around them.
@@thegrouchization Or better yet, have a glowing laser pointer
@@thegrouchization Bungie forgot about that trick in Halo 2.
It's a tricky one to get right.
On the one hand it sucks to get hit in such a rhythm that the pause an enemy has that allows you to counter is filled by another enemy starting their combo. Jedi Survivor could be bad for that, often leaving you no openings to attack
On the other hand you get the earlier Assassins Creed games where you can *see* the enemies around you not attack because you're fighting someone.
And it ALWAYS sucks to get blindsided by an attack from off screen.
@@DragonNexusI think this raises the question of "which behaviour constitutes 'lying to the player'?" Changing enemy behaviour based on external factors like visibility, or hiding dangers offscreen where the player can't effectively react to them?
An example of lying that really pisses me of is the dice rolls in Baldurs Gate 3. As someone who has a lot of experience with the D20, the RNG manipulation it openly skews the results towards the extreme, meaning that actual build choices and character specialization kinda stop applying. To Larians credit, this system can be turned off.
Also, unless their presence is explicitly spelled then hidden, automatic difficulty adjustments can go die in a fire. Most games I play are at least partially for the challenge so the possibility of it being tweaked without me knowing basically undermines the point of the playing.
The horse in Inquisition was probably a really bad example to use when everyone and their mother was roasting that thing for being so completely useless.
Yeah, even the footage didn't show the horse feeling faster whatsover.
little correction, We RTS players are generally pretty aware that the AI is cheating, Some RTS even pull back the curtain and let us know how much an AI is cheating, and even let us tweak certain values like resource generation or build speed. We just kinda accept that because its the only way the AI can really offer a challenge beyond the learning phases of the game, and sometimes winning an unfair fight can be its own fun.
I think its great fun as long as its clear how the AI cheats. Handicaps can be fun but they need to be clear for all parties involved.
Devs, please, just don't lie when playing in a higher difficulty. We're in to improve and face adversity, nothing feels worse than finding out you got invisible help after you beat a higher difficulty.
Fantastic idea!
I want to see FROMSoft remove all the i-frames from their games so you can't take advantage of the frames of invincibility they provide you with to give you a fighting chance against enemies you would realistically stand no chance against.
And while we're at it, lets make the hitboxes in Touhous represent the actual size of the sprites themselves and make it so that they register 100% of the time.
Honestly, people like yourself have absolutely no idea just how much assistance you're given behind the scenes that you don't even notice because games are balanced around them and if you remove them, the games stop being fun (or become practically impossible.)
In many games where players get invisible help (like X COM), it is removed on higher difficulties.
I mean, higher difficulties are inherently based on lies. Because the developer is giving the 'enemy' advantages that they didn't have on normal difficulty.
But I see what you mean about not giving secret assists when in high difficulties. Though I guess the real problem isn't the assist as much as the game being 'found out' and spoiling the perceived experience.
I feel like that's something you *think* you want, but if you actually got it, you'd hate it.
Like if music players chose shuffled songs 100% randomly.
@@DragonNexus That was one of the things I loved about Winamp 2. When set to shuffle it would play the entire playlist exactly once before is started over. You could even scroll through the list and see which songs had been played and not.
Surprised he didn't mention Coyote Time, an industry term for a trick/lie where a player is given a brief moment after moving off a ledge before they start falling. This is most useful in platformers, especially 1st person games as you can't look at your feet to gauge distance to the edge while doing other things, so they give players a buffer so players with bad timing can still jump from the ledge even if slightly too late.
It's a much, much better sell of the idea of lying being a positive than rubber banding or enemies getting infinite resources in RTSs
@@DragonNexus To be fair those examples are good ones, they're just much harder to get right without the player noticing.
And in racing games it's a bit of a no-win situation as whether or not to use rubber banding.
If you don't races are won on pure skill but the most skilled players may be left unchallenged as once they get a big enough lead there's no way the AI racers can catch up, bar some major error by the player, leading to boredom.
However using rubberbanding poorly leads to races where the player is incapable of gaining any kind of lead and any tiny error lead them to fall behind immediately resulting in them being overpunishing and constantly overintense in the amount of concentration needed to win.
And it doesn't help that the good amount of rubber banding is different from player to player so there needs to a subsystem monitoring player behaviour and figuring out race to race, moment to moment, how much rubberbanding is needed without the player noticing.
@@PlebNC I half remember Mario Kart 8's system where it will asign the other racers with a role. Can't find the dang video that explained it. One is your rival and works hardest to keep up with you. Some are more about being in the way. Some are asigned the role off bad driver and are easily passed. They worked to make it so races were exciting but not cheap. If your rival gets ahead, their car slows down so you can catch up. It's rubber banding, but it's done more smartly. There's always a character in a race that you start hating because the game has asigned them as your rival.
Edit: Okay, I didn't even remember the game right. It was Mario Kart 64 ruclips.net/video/rt25DfiTKqc/видео.html
Yeah no, gonna have to disagree with that. Very few things feel as terrible as catching a game lying to you, it completely destroys suspension of disbelief. In fact, it makes the problem of people blaming the game instead of themselves worse, because once they know that the game can outright lie to you deliberately, they will start second guessing everything and making up scenarios where the game did them dirty.
Well that's the whole thing isn't it? Deception that you realize happened is inherently failed deception. Of course the experience is worse. A failed crafting system would make the experience worse. I don't think that's a condemnation of crafting systems, just a condemnation of people trying to shove them into games where they clearly don't work.
Most of the highest rated games out there use some forms of deception. Some in small ways. Some in really big ones. But they're great games, and that is at least in part because of those deceptions.
There's a few game genres where I think it's okay. Like, for example, any time you're adapting a board game into a video game and you have difficulty. How the hell else is the computer supposed to be hard to beat if they can't cheat on their dice rolls? Or a strategy game, it makes sense that the computer would need to cheat because programming proper strategy is pretty goddamn hard. Recently with modern AI advancements that might be changing, but still point stands.
Now with all that being said, I think this is actually the reason for the rise of souls likes. More and more people are getting where they can see through the deception naturally.
@@FireFox64000000 I think the change in the audiences ability to perceive a lie is actually hugely important to video game deception. Early racing games that used rubber banding were pretty popular and it was generally well received. But most players then didn't know what rubber banding was.
In modern times, rubber banding is practically a swear word in racing games. Because it is a deception that will always fail today. People are looking for it.
I think it's also important to point out that a lot of deception games do has little to do with difficulty or making AI harder to beat. It's more often disguising the game parts of the game. Papering over the things that would ruin your immersion or lying to you about loading screens so it doesn't FEEL as bad.
There's a balance. There is a ton of benefit to games lying to you, but if they lie BADLY it can bring the whole experience down. Just like any other tool.
I don’t play this game but I hear FIFA players bemoaning ‘scripting’ all the time. I gather they’re talking about the game basically manufacturing an event with the player powerless to avoid it. I bet that half of the time, it was nothing to do with scripting but the idea has got in their head
Changing difficulty settings mid-game against the players' wishes is a garbage thing to do, and finding out that a game did that destroys any sense of accomplishment players may have had upon beating a hard game. Having a separate mode with those settings is fine but it should NEVER be the default. I picked Hard for a reason, let me play on Hard.
If the devs want to go the extra mile, being able to change difficulty settings after the game starts is good as long as it's the player's choice.
-And rigged RNG rates are just inexcusable.
I think it's a matter of context. The fact that the first bullet fired always misses in a Bioshock fight? Yeah, people miss. Especially when it's dark and you got shaky hands from injecting drugs all day.
Devil May Cry 4 bumping down the difficulty of a boss fight and then not telling me until after I beat it, and penalizing me for it when I never wanted the downgrade? HELL NO!
Good lesson: people, do not play Bioshock after injecting drugs 😊
BG3s "karmic dice"
If you turn it on they will fail you often to keep things interesting
If you turn them off you will succeed almost everything assuming you build for those checks.
I really wish there was an option to turn the dynamic difficulty off. I understand why it's there, but I work very hard not to fall victim to the self serving bias trap by assuming I'm shit unless empirically proved otherwise, and observing dynamic difficulty robs me of any sense of achievement
I personally hate when difficulty is shifted in the background. I find I either notice it happening or consider it random chance that the AI did something that made things easier or harder, and blame the game design for making me rely on enemies doing a specific attack pattern or glitching out and not doing anything. It never feels like I got better or worse, and more that I got lucky or unlucky. Plus I love trying to overcome a challenge, so it's not fun when I'm handed a win.
I totally get that, but I'm also reminded of a stand up routine from Dara O'brien. A video game is the only medium with stories where you can be told you aren't good enough to see it. And a developer deciding that that's bad is valid. I don't think it makes it bad design inherently. Obviously developers can and do also include things like easy mode. But that ALSO feels bad. So it's not a silver bullet solution either.
Not enjoying it is totally valid. But I think it's important to recognize the value a thing can have even if it isn't our taste.
There is always the option of just asking the player if they want to change difficulty. There have been games out there where death streaks trigger a loading screen notice about adjustable difficulty
Wait how does easy mode also feel bad? I don’t think I agree with what you are saying
@@playathesaints9599 Nobody wants to be told they're playing on easy mode so makes it less enjoyable for many people that do use it. And many people won't use it, even when they should. People will often choose hard mode even if they KNOW it will make the experience less enjoyable. And then end up quitting half way through.
Everybody doesn't work that way. But many do. It's a well documented problem and I can almost guarantee if you google something like "the problem with difficulty settings" there'll be about 27 thousand videos and articles that pop up discussing this and the many other issues they have.
I'm honestly surprised you'd be the kind of person to watch a video from Second Wind and not have already heard this a dozen times. But then, you never know. Have fun out there.
@@karl0ssus1 Of course, but unfortunately choosing an easier difficulty is hard for some people. It feels condescending to even be asked. And if feels like defeat to choose it. And when you think about it, that's most of the problem people have with automatic difficulty. It's just that they only feel that if they catch on. So it doesn't really solve the problem, does it?
The way Portal 2 just quietly swaps the blue and orange portals in certain high intensity sections so that whichever portal you shoot out turns out to be the right one fascinates me. It is an elegant solution to keep things going, and subtle enough I never noticed until it was pointed out.
Wait what the fuck? I've played through that a dozen times and never noticed.
@@LethargicScientist
Yep. Only in quick live-or-die situations though. Like "The Part Where He Kills You". Whichever portal you place underneath yourself will let you escape, regardless of what you put up on the catwalk. The catwalk portal just gets swapped to match if you hit the wrong trigger.
I hate life bars that don't give an honest tally. It doesn't make the fights more exciting. Fantasy Strike is a great example.
Interesting that you added in imagery of the Obra Din at the end... As I can't think of any needed systems or mechanics that would be 'lying ' in that.
Same with hollow knight
same with bloodborne
@@moartems5076 Hollow knight does the health trick. I know that.
Obra Dinn will accept multiple valid answers for a few things, but idk if that would be considered “lying”, per se.
@@Tustin2121 I didn't know that! Interesting.
Fire emblem is also notorious for doing this. A 95% hit chance is basically a 99% hit chance under the hood.
0:59 "let's look at loading screens" he says at the EXACT moment my RUclips page has a problem loading the video. I wondered if this guy was having a laugh at me for a moment until I realized it was on my end and laughed myself.
I've seen the levers being pulled in RE2 remake, and it was infuriating. Zombies that used to go down in 3 bullets were taking 8-12 bullets because I was good at managing my resources...which made managing those resources feel like it didn't matter at all, because it's just going to turn the dial on how many of them I need depending on how many I have.
I think this lying can often backfire. If the player becomes aware of it, it can lessen the experience. I play quite a lot of tabletop games and those games can’t lie. I really don’t know why it would be that important in video games.
what do you mean they can't lie. in a lot of tabletop rpgs, gms have the opportunity to lie all the time and they frequently do.
"The mount in DA:I does fuck all"
I FUCKING KNEW IT
Honestly, the DA:I horse sprint was something that made me quite disinterested in the game. Like... why include a feature that's unusable? It wasn't good, and I felt that it was condescending they included it. I felt very negatively about the objective truth that I wasn't actually getting anywhere faster. Wish they just pointed me to the fast travel instead.
I remember playing Soldier of Fortune 2. It was *extremely* obvious that the AI was wallhacking. You would open doors and discover enemies standing there with their guns already pointed at you, ready to fire, and once you got the gun with the scope that sees through walls, you could see them standing on the other side of the door with their guns tracking you. I can usually tell when the developers are faking a search with the enemies (if the searching enemies are always wandering towards the player that they supposedly can't see, that's a big tell), and it's annoying, but in SoF2 it was egregious.
Also, it's generally obvious when all your narrative choices in a game lead to the same point. I don't necessarily mind, unless a big deal has been made about the player's narrative agency.
There's a difference between something like that and F.E.A.R. which felt like it had insanely good AI. But it was a lot of trickery and smoke and mirrors.
But in the moment, it feels like they're trying to outsmart you. So you in turn outsmart them.
Game mechanics that heavily harmed my enjoyment in games:
RE4 dynamic difficulty: when the spawn of 8 enemies was reduced to 4 I kept almost beating. When it happened I was concerned I broke the game, as restarting didn't bring back the 8 enemies. Thankfully turning off the GC and reloading did fix it, but finding out that the difficulty was lowered really harmed my enjoyment m thankfully, the hardest the hardest difficulty disables it, but it's my one big red checkmark against RE4.
Telltale the walking dead *will remember that" when I put one character through the ringer, disagreeing with the at every chance, yet still was willing to do everything I said really made the game experience hollow and took the fun I had up to it and really soured my expectations for the rest of the game and I felt disengaged to play any sequels.
Just wanted to say, doing these lies do cause harm directly to the player, and it's up to the dev to see if the tradeoff is worth it.
The “will remember that” thing really is the worst way to do that sort of game, imo. If the devs wanted to show that the player affected the outcome of the game, they’d show something on screen at the time of the decision point, reminding the player of a choice they made prior. Much more impactful imo for the player to go “oh yeah, that was a thing I did”.
@@Tustin2121 You're just describing the same thing in a different way.
@@crushycrawfishy1765 Not at all, because they just discussed about how many of those upfront messages are a lie: Many Telltale choices are pure illusion of choice, they don't actually matter, or not significantly. That deception is much harder to pull off if the game instead reminds you of your choice when it actually has consequences, rather than just telling you that it will have them.
@@crushycrawfishy1765 - That’s kind of the point…? It’s all about perception.
I remember for The Walking Dead Season 1 I looked at all the branching paths… I found out your choices don’t matter. Everything comes to the same conclusion. If you save a character, the other one dies or leaves by the next episode until they’re all gone. I guess because they were planning multiple seasons, you’d have to reach an equilibrium at some point because it would become an exponential problem on the dev side. But if there’s no continuation between seasons then why and how can I get invested? My choices have no meaning. I didn’t bother with the other seasons or even other Telltale games after that. Better off playing a Supermassive game. Because as dumb and hokey as they are (and barely games) at least they have multiple endings so your choices actually matter.
My favorite example of a game's lies is with the first Amnesia game. Since dying repeatedly to the same enemies would completely ruin any sense of horror (and replace it with plain frustration), the devs did a sneaky and actually despawn certain enemies if you die to them too much. The game won't tell you this, of course, so you'll always feel like you just missed that terrible monster. Finding this out, though, also ruins the horror - which is why I'm glad I only found out after I had already beaten the game!
Didn't Amnesia actually have it so that you could never actually die?
As in there there is no fail state whatsoever, it just makes you believe there is by outright lying to you?
I found out half way through. It's dumb that dying removes enemies.
I’d say it’s worth it if it keeps the horror element intact with one feels for a type of enemy. But what alternate do you suggest?
@@playathesaints9599 make the enemy scary with the ruleset: punish the player harshly for dying. Also: the enemy can be filtered away when close.
Yeah, I've noticed it a lot in a number of games I've played. I drop those games or bump the difficulty up because I hate being lied to. I want my failures and successes to actually be meaningful. Once the smoke and mirror illusion is shattered so to is any sense or feeling of accomplishment. I'm playing Borderlands 2 right now and, even though I find the gameplay loop boring and the death/respawn mechanic annoying, I also noticed that I feel like I've accomplished a lot by defeating a difficult enemy that killed me once before. By thinking about the fight I was just in, what the enemy's attack patterns are, what the enemy's health type is (health, armor, or shields) and which damage type among the weapons I have stockpiled can get the job done I feel a real sense of growth and accomplishment. If I notice that the enemy I'm fighting is too strong and keeps killing me over and over again and suddenly it gets easier to kill when I haven't changed anything I put the game down and never pick it up again.
I make small games in my spare time and I've noticed that the games I make that people have the most fun in are the games where I'm brutally honest about the difficulty. They get more and more determined to win and then feel incredibly accomplished in the end when they finally succeed. I believe games should be tough, but honest and fair. Lying to your players to "keep them engaged" makes us no better than designers of slot machines. Just designing a game to make them think "this time for sure!" when in reality the game was rigged from the start.
Edit: I also just remembered an example of why these lies are unnecessary: board games! Also tabletop games like D&D. These wouldn't be successful like they are if lying to the players was a necessity.
I find myself in strong opposition to your defense of this practice. You say "what matters is how the player feels during the experience," but I disagree. While how we feel during play IS important, so is how we feel after playing, in retrospect. Looking back on a game experience and realizing that it was all artificial and built on lies diminishes the experience. I want a game to give it to me straight, and if it can't generate the thrill and tension organically, it hasn't been designed well enough.
"Players never notice it." Like hell we don't. I notice fairly often (not always), and it always annoys me.
Absolutely this.
I have a top level reply talking about the same thing before I read yours. RTS games are so awful for this, and I hate it. You should be able to practice and gain skills by playing against an AI before going against human opponents, but the skills you learn to beat the AI are useless in PvP. You're not leaning to be better at the game, you're learning how to manipulate the AI.
I suppose other genres can fudge the math a bit more behind the scenes, but it's dead obvious in an RTS where it should be impossible for the AI to have the resources it does given how many workers they've built and the time that has passed.
You only noticed the times it was obvious. For every 1 time the deception failed, 99 times it succeeded. Game devs HAVE to do this, not because it's a code or philosophy that you can choose to do or not, but because games would be too easy if they didn't. I guarantee your favorite game does this a thousand times and you'd hate the game if it didn't. Games wouldn't feel fun. Good game devs know that games are crafted experiences, not fully immersive worlds. That part's the illusion. You just don't like having that bubble burst, but every game that didn't intentionally craft an experience in this way you've instantly discarded as a "bad game". One that feels unfair. One that feels like no playtesting was done whatsoever. You can't make intelligent, challenging AI because we aren't using Machine Learning algorithms for video game AI yet. They're just a few simple lines of code. Games are inherently deception. The threes can't be cut in half, they're just triangle meshes with a 2D texture over it.
If you really want fairness and no deception your only real option is to play against another human who's just as favored by the game as you are because it's required that there's an equal intelligence on the other side to be weighed against yours in order to create a proper challenge.
but it wasnt artificial... it felt real and special at that moment 😭
@@gwen9939 You're making a lot of bold assumptions about what I do and don't notice. There are games where I notice it, but still like the game *in spite of* it.
Then there are games, like Total War, that totally cheat based on difficulty setting, but most of those cheats are openly displayed in the settings, so it isn't lying.
And it's not like Super Mario made the timer tick down more slowly once you got low on time, or made your hitbox smaller if you died too often. There are ways to design games with minimal deception. Some genres, like competitive FPS or fighting games will likely need to keep giving the AI cheats for some time to come, but those are tailor made for multiplayer, anyway, and playing against AI is terrible practice because of the AI reading inputs and reacting frame-perfectly, or seeing through walls, and so on.
A game outright lying to me with false information feels a lot less excusable to me. I'm a big boy. I can handle the truth.
Man this dropped a lot of imagery without examples. Is this just random footage or like, show your working? I've played a lot of these things without seeing things, I'm genuinely unaware if these are cases of the discussed subtle hidden easy modes happening I haven't noticed or just bait?
I think it really does matter if a game is coddling me by lowering the difficulty and trying to hide it after I fail a few times. It's both insulting and depriving me of the sense of accomplishment I wanted, when a game decides FOR ME that I can't handle a certain challenge. Let me bash my head against a wall until it breaks if that's what I'm into, don't just remove the wall entirely, without asking, when you think I've had enough.
@@summersmashhit9177 I agree completely, it’s really disrespectful and condescending when games do that.
While i completely understand the sentiment and personally i would not like my walls removed, i also see why games do this. It takes some degree of maturity or commitment to decide to try a thing until you succeed. Many people would like to think that they are up to the challenge, but in a moment of rage they give up or quit the game. Others just don't enjoy losing repeatedly and want to experience the rest of the game without the frustrating part, and devs don't want to lose these people.
Like you said, people could be insulted when told this upright, so some games just hide this "help".
I don’t see the issue with that if a game has a lower difficulty. And if the player doesn’t want to lower the difficulty and doesn’t want to pass the wall they can log off the game.
@@Lilith_Harbinger Exactly this. Lot of these comments have a lot of panties in a twist, but most of them would throw the controller in a rage and quit the game if the "help" was removed. Devs need to protect players from themselves as part of their job. They just can't make it too obvious.
@@crushycrawfishy1765 Then by this logic, can't games also at least ALWAYS give me help at any point in the game I need it? So many games give me help I didn't need or want because I screwed up only a handful of times early on in a not very hard early part. Points where I absolutely still wanted to keep trying, and if anything killed my fun, it was ruining my ability to feel accomplishment by making the challenge easier, not the challenge being too hard.
But then fast forward to the endgame, I'm at try number 57 on the final optional super boss. I haven't had any fun for a while now, am making no further progress with each attempt, my misery has far, far overwhelmed my pride, and I am as close to controller smashing rage as I ever reach. I would GLADLY take a whole lot of help to finally just get that over with, as much help as it takes. All I want is for it to be over. And of course, OF COURSE the game won't do anything to help at that point. if it's so damn important to make sure players are never ever frustrated by challenge, why are games so willing to make the easy early game even easier but never willing to make the hardest parts easier? Anti-frustration measures should cover the entire game if it's so important, not just the main plot content.
One that struck (while watching a let's play) is the xenomorph in Alien Isolation knows where you are in a broad sense enough though it shouldn't. There is a recurring situation where there are two boxes, usually the same size with a similar number of rooms, which will be attached by a single corridor meaning when you need to go from box to the other you have one route. A thing I noticed is the xenomorph is always in the same box as you even though it shouldn't be able to know you are in that box while also not being able to find you under that god damn table inches away from it.
I am fine with manipulated information for the sake of the moment but I hate it when I can't count on information I need to make accurate choices. This is why I prefer a numeric value or specific increment resource. I want to know how much health I am losing to a given hit so I can pick my time to choose a dodge over a trade since us both hitting for 5 health when I have 10 and the other player has 5 is win and vice versa is a loss. Once I know I can't trust information I need then I find it hard to treat any information as trustworthy. This one was a big problem in Baldur's Gate, so big the devs even talked about it, was the assumption of the ticking clock because characters say there is one when there isn't. Even though people can say you're told the Mindflayer transformation isn't progressing as it should the majority of opinions and lessons taught to you on the mindflayer ship make it clear that's not conclusive. This means you push yourself to the limit and avoid sleeping as much as possible to ward off the transformation that you were told can happen in an instant because someone hits a button.
"Players don't like true randomness, you think you do but you don't." Counter-argument: Kenshi
I've been playing a lot of Kenshi recently and it's shown me just how much I don't care for game devs lying to me. Kenshi is a game where the game rules are universal, if I can beat enemies within an inch of their life and steal the clothes off their back, the same can happen to me. If a boss is so powerful that he can solo your entire army, you too can become powerful enough to solo his entire army. It is a game that revels in chaos but I can never call any of it unfair because I was the one who tried to walk into town with stolen goods. I am the one who saw the dozen bandits coming from a mile away and thought I could solo them, etc.
The game is hard but all of it's challenges are clearly advertised as such and most of the player's failure comes from overestimating their own readiness.
3:45 the greatest ad transition of all time
I mean, your mindset of, "it doesn't matter as long as they don't notice," isn't wrong, per se, but it does ignore the fundamental problem of lying: no one likes being lied to. Even and perhaps especially if the lie was, "you're really skilled and did it all on your own you big boy you!" But a similar demoralization can easily come from the game just pulling a "fuck you I win" routine because they devs couldn't make an AI that competes with the player on a level playing field. Sure, programming better AI might not be practical, or even possible, but that doesn't mean that the players skilled enough to push the AI so hard it starts cheating aren't going to be the most likely to notice and be pissed that their skills now don't matter. It's much better to just be honest about an asymmetric playing field at higher difficulty levels and then cap the experience so that skilled players can get a sense of completeness from having surpassed what AI can throw their way. Or give an optional super-upgrade like Mario does which the player can pointedly ignore, or keep giving reminders that you're doing this to yourself, Dave, you could lower the difficulty at any time!
There's _always_ a better solution than just blatantly lying like that, especially in a medium where the people who care enough to notice are going to be the most upset that there's a lie at all. The code-trawlers, the sweaty tryhards, etc. Sure, I had a decently fun time testing my "sword" skills against the NPC fencers in the swordplay games on Wii Sports Resort, but eventually the fact that they were winning because the game just refused to accurately put my sword where the remote was telling it to go became unacceptably difficult to deal with, the necessary routines I had to go through to swing accurately that the AI just skipped were too much, and so despite the fact that in a fair contest I probably could have beat them I just threw up my hands. That was a tech issue, not technically the game lying to me...but it's a similar principal. If the game initially acts like one thing's going to be the case (a fair duel between swordsmiis who both have equal control over their swords) and then proceeds to for reasons you'll have a hard time spotting in the moment just _not_ deliver on that promise...the game has failed.
I hate when difficulty is adjusted. If I set it to hard, I WANT to die repeatedly until I figure it out. Nobody likes being lied to.
you're wrong, people like being lied to, they just don't like that they find out they're being lied to
@@pinkysweets Very worrisome when people say things like this. What else is actually good as long a you don't get caught in your world?
@@pinkysweets I agree with where you're coming from I think, but I wouldn't say that exactly. You can lie to people in ways that aren't beneficial to them at all. SOME lies enhance a game. Some just suck. Some will fail because they aren't good at deception and they get found out. Some will fail because they never achieved the good thing they were going for in the first place.
@@ClothesCat Magic acts. Most entertainment really.
As far as i know this is not done in "difficult" settings but in "beginner" or normal ones. The point of most of these invisible helps is to make the game more accessible to people who have a hard time with it, so obviously it's not for people who WANT to have a hard time.
With all of the Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Elden Ring b-roll in this video I feel like it's worth talking about how those games *don't* lie to you, and why it's important that they don't. These games are meant to be tough, dying a lot is part of the intended experience, but they're also meant to feel fair. People play them because they want to overcome their challenges by their own effort. Quietly adjusting the game's difficulty in the background would ruin that experience, as progressing would become less about learning to overcome the game's obstacles and more about just dying until the game gives you a free pass. The moment players catch on to this kind of thing, you lose the ability to give them a feeling of accomplishment for winning a fight. And it's not really possible to keep players from catching on in a game where they're expected to die a lot.
A good episode, but you keep doubling down saying "players never notice this or if they do, care" and I think that is just wrong. I have noticed every one of your examples, maybe not at the time but as I have played games I have noticed them. I don't bring it up because I largely buy into the developer's conclusions, though I do think it has made them lazy in some regard. My go-to example is the AI in half-life one seemed more like a special military force trying to hunt down Mr. Freeman than the decades waves of meat grinder-bound, hit-scan idiots in things like COD or Red Dead Redemption.
I think FEAR is considered best AI to this day b a lot of people because it was so aggressive.
Most of these lies are what make me stop playing a game when i detect the lie.
I've developed the habit of purposefully trying to find cracks in game design (don't know why probably just from having played for 25 years) and honestly, yeah I don't like the mechanical lies - the worst offenders seem to be linear narratives and some action games. Often I'll explore every nook and cranny and sometimes miss scripted events because I'm looking the wrong way, or I'll stop running in a chase sequence just to see how much the game tries to slow down for me not to get caught
For action games some of them will give a slow motion QTE prompt and I've sat idle just to find out that after a full minute, they didn't program a fail state so everything is frozen until you react to the "quick" time event
You say players rarely notice these lies, but a large amount of the examples you gave I not only noticed but actually lessened my game experience. Usually when I find out a game lowers the difficulty to match my performance I lose interest in playing because I don't feel like I'm actually improving. That said I agree with you that with the nature of AI and simulation it is necessary.
The Dragon Age horse example isn't great however. I used to think it provided a small speed boost, but due to actual speed not matching the speed special effects they showed, it actually felt slower that walking.
As a long time fighting game enthusiast and competitor, I despise the practice of scaling health bars in fighting games. It is just done to sell fake hype to spectators who don't know any better, making actually close matches look like insurmountable comebacks. To the actual players it just makes the information provided on the screen more difficult to decipher. This gets exacerbated even further when the scaling is character specific (looking at you, Guilty Gear).
What? Scaling in fighting games has always been a thing. Otherwise each match would just be three combos and the round is over or we'd have what MK1 is where combos go on forever because they do such little damage.
@@crushycrawfishy1765 You seem to have misinterpreted me, so please allow me to clarify.
What you are referring to is called combo scaling, where each hit of a combo does less damage the longer a combo lasts. This is good and healthy for the game as it discourages long/infinite combos and rewards creative play around resets and mixups. I'm all for it.
What I am rallying against here is the health bar itself scaling, that is to say when you take less damage at lower health. This is not the same thing, and mechanically it accomplishes basically nothing while obfuscating important information from the players.
If a 25% full health bar is actually 50% of your health, then the screen is lying to you and the information can't be trusted. In the most egregious cases, it can actually encourage long drawn-out combos at low health, because if every hit is doing 1 damage, then you might as well just string as many low-damage hits together as possible for efficiency (again, looking at you, Guilty Gear).
I can name numerous examples - both old and modern - that have used this type of system (Street Fighter 4, every Guilty Gear game), and that haven't (every Marvel VS Capcom Game, Dragon Ball FighterZ, BlazBlue).
Aside, I find it funny that you mentioned 3-combo rounds as if that would be a problem, when many of the popular modern 2D fighting games (SF6, GGST, UNI2, even MK1) are very specifically and very intentionally designed around 3-combo rounds, give or take a combo depending on super meter.
Good quality as always, but the take is terrible imho. I absolutely hate when games lie to me, and the very fact that any game I play at any time just might be lying, even if it isn't, takes away so much of my enjoyment. Struggles feel forced and unavoidable and accomplishments feel hollow, unless I can know for a fact that I've gotten them fair and square. Nothing sucks more than feeling like you've only won because the game let you.
And it's not even a case of "it works until you realize you're being lied to", because as soon as you realize one game lied to you, you will now come to the same conclusion about other games that much faster. Worse still, you'll start believing games are lying to you even when they aren't. If all games were always fair, this would never be a problem (at least not a real one, people claiming it's the game cheating would probably still be a thing because humans, lol)
This is honestly why I feel difficulty options for games should fully describe what they actually do. Because I don't want to start the game on hard because the AI may do things I consider cheap and unfair. However normal may have too many advantages still attached. One of my pet peeves is when difficulty actually controls the enemy count because I never want to be fighting less enemies, that's giving me less game, I just want an easier time fighting the enemies, I don't want every enemy to be capable on one-shotting me and every minor skirmish to be the equivalent of a game-ending life and death struggle worthy of a final battle. I can understand having to occasionally manipulate the odds in an XCOM, because at some point the hit has to be certain, but honestly I feel the rest of the time things should be left pretty 1:1 with no additional skewing.
I mean you claim it's a necessary evil but the rubber-banding in racing games is one of the worst things ever. Nothing feels worse than being miles ahead, make one tiny mistake, and having everyone instantly pass you because the rubberband decided to rebound in that very moment. Rather than a rubber-band there should just be another difficulty level where the AI should simply be capable of using more of the car's potential. Till eventually there's a difficulty level that I can more or less keep pace with and occasionally surpass. At very lease there should be no rebound mechanic, the difficulty should determine the length of the rubber-band at best.
In command and conquer the game series, your structures need power, unless your the AI who often times will have base defenses function even if they have no powerplants. And they ignore the fog of war, on higher difficulties they can see your stealth but cant shoot it unless they have something with detection, the amount of times the enemy AI has attempted to crush my stealth units that they not know are there is a lot
I am not someone who plays games to maintain a sense of tension and excitement. I usually play them to wind down and relax. The last thing I want is for the AI to cheat in some manner to keep me in an elevated stress state.
One of my favorite examples of games lying to you is hitboxes! In a lot of games, enemy hitboxes will be much bigger than they appear, to make it easier to hit them. Conversely with the player's hurtbox, which is usually smaller to make it harder for enemies to hit you.
The one thing I absolutly disagree with is changing the difficulty based on performance, if I wanted the game to be easier I would have picked an easier difficutly, dont cheat me out of my acomplishments of beating something I died 100 times to
I appreciate the insight, thanks for your work! A couple of points - most of us know about the loading screen / animation being essentially a load bar and we don't mind; good example - when you fly from one star system to the next in No Man's Sky, you fly through a nicely animated wormhole tunnel, but we all know that the tunnel will only last for as long as it takes for the next starsystem to load in 😉
As for dropping the difficulty after a couple of fails by the player, seriously, nothing pisses me off more than a game notably lowering the difficulty becouse i failed a couple of times. It's like being a baby and trying to walk, then falling a couple of times and then the parents just give you a walker with wheels to walk around in so you stop crying. Part of growing up in life and gaming is failing a lot, overcoming your failings and becoming a stronger and better person / player.
Seriously, don't do that or at least as non-notable as possible becouse this "helping" makes more serious players quit then it helps to retain imho. Not the casuals tho, but then again they don't tend to play the same game for a long time anyway.
7:56 Oh, no. I have very low self-esteem and self-worth, and internalize failure into who I am as a person, even if its just a game. Blaming myself for failure is the first thing I do, and I know for a fact I'm incapable of "getting güd".
Which is why I prefer easy mode, or just don't even bother to attempt things that might be a challenge for me.
I already know I'm a loser; I don't need a game to assure me of that. It's like when we played powerhouses in high school sports. We already know we can't win, why even bother showing up? Where's the pride in getting blown out on our home turf, 63-3?
I don't like _most_ games. I once considered myself a Gamer (capitol G) but... no longer. Sometime in my 30s I realized I was blasting through games, barely giving them a chance, and hating them all. It took me a long time to realize that it's because of the concepts you've illustrated here. I can _feel_ it when a game lies to me, and it feels _bad._ Now, I can only manage hard base-builders with self-imposed difficulty curves, such as Factorio and Oxygen Not Included, and simulation style games, to name a few. Sure, there's some conceits and some obvious manipulation, but if I don't play it _right,_ it all goes to hell, and I know that only I am to blame. I think a lot of this is due to the fact that LIFE is hard, and my JOB is hard, and I hate everything. I might need to see a therapist, but I'm fairly sure I'd hate that, too.
Some of these are okay, but most of the time these are great examples of the death of gaming and devolution into raw mindless consumer slop.
These are all things games have been doing since the beginning...
@@InsanoRider777 For real, This is why game devs can rarely be upfront with gamers. You give them some behind the scenes of how games work and they get up in arms over something they barely notice.
@@InsanoRider777 "Since the beginning" is almost certainly not true. That implies that RPGs on the Commodore 64 or TRS-80 used part of their valuable memory for this kind of "hand-holding" code. I would bet very good money that that is not true.
I'm not going to tell game devs what they should or shouldn't do, but I will say -I- don't like being lied to about things that, were I to find out, I would not like. Even without finding out, I don't like to have to worry about whether I beat a challenge because I personally improved, or the game just decided to "hand it to me on a silver platter", and would be very bothered were it to have done the latter.
Regarding some other comments, I'd rather not accept "But what if you're lied to well enough that you never find out" either, because that could be used to justify just about any kind of lie.
Some people are fine with the game lying to them about fundamental mechanics and game difficulty (and that is totally fine), I personally am not.
cmon dude stick to pre-rolls and end-rolls. mid-roll ads are so annoying. is SW trying to financially protect themselves from frost’s departure?
NOOO how did i forget you talked about making an episode about lying when you showed design delve out of context
"Mario Party seeds rolls beforehand"
Not true, at least not universally. If that were the case, then no amount of save abuse could change the rolls, but I've done that several times in various entries (single-player only of course) with decent success.
Sometimes it might be worth it to just tell the player straight up that you are adjusting the difficulty. A lot of people point to Resident Evil 4's dynamic difficulty as a sore spot, because they believe that the game *secretly* lowering the difficulty is treating them like a baby, like they aren't good enough and need the extra help.
In reality, Resident Evil 4's system is no different than Smash Ultimate's Classic Mode, or Kid Icarus: Uprising, or God Hand. Those three games all have dynamic difficulty, too. The difference is that they put a meter on the screen, telling you exactly where it's set, and let you know that when you die, it'll go down. Playing at higher difficulties gives you better rewards, but comes with the risk of failure due to the increased challenge.
Resident Evil 4 is the exact same, it just doesn't tell you where you are on the scale at any given time.
It's always comforting to know everytime you see that 13% percent hit chance with 3% crit from enemies in Fire Emblem you know it just means 100%. 😂
Yes, I have caught games lying to me, and it bothers me deeply every time.
For example, I noticed how enemy aim suddenly gets way worse in some games when your health is critically low. Completely killed the feeling of success that comes from surviving a near defeat, because surviving that near defeat was not at all the same thing as surviving when I was doing well. It wasn't earned. And it also undermined the feeling of fairness of messing up in the first place, because that meant that relatively speaking, the game was trying harder to hurt me when I was doing better. Suddenly nothing felt earned or fair, and both success and failure no longer felt like they were in my hands as a player. My sense of agency was irreparably damaged.
Or in games where ammo is usually in some sort of box or crate, such as Half-Life 2, I eventually realized that the amount and type of ammo in crates depends on how much ammo you currently have. In which case, why even try to be careful with resources? Use your resources well and the game will just "reward" you by getting stingier with ammo to negate your effort, leading to the same problem as when auto-adjusting difficulty making things harder when you're doing better: Instead of being rewarded for doing a better job with not having to worry about ammo or the game just plain feeling easier, you're getting punished with more challenge by doing better. That completely negates the point of doing better in the first place. Making the game easier is the entire payoff for getting gud.
And on the opposite end of the dial, making the game easier when I'm struggling completely negates the ability to feel like I eventually succeeded, because if the problem got easier, then it's not really the problem I failed at in the first place. Succeeding where I failed before has effectively become impossible, because the point I failed before ceased to exist. There have absolutely been times I was not at all ready to throw in the towel and demand the game not ratchet things down, but nope, automatic difficulty adjustments decided I was probably getting frustrated and made that decision for me. And that sucks as much as being frustrated by things being too hard. So yeah, I say games should absolutely stop automatically adjusting difficulty. Making things easier or harder is fine in itself, I have no problem with people dialing in their personal challenge sweet spot, but should always be a choice in the player's hands. Don't make the game easier OR harder until I say I want things to be easier or harder. Until games can directly read my feelings straight from my brain, they'll never understand my personal level of optimal challenge more than I myself do.
And as long as I'm ranting here, I get really tired of games only making things easier in the relatively easy parts. If I had a nickel for every time games were willing to make things easier when I didn't need or want it, I'd have soooo many nickels. Piles of them. But when it comes to a game's most hardcore super challenges? The times I'm well and truly sick of throwing myself at the wall and would gladly take a challenge reduction? Of course games NEVER EVER ratchet that challenge down. And say what you will, but if you ask me, that's wrong. If a game's gonna have variable difficulty, if the point is to make sure player of all skill levels are having a good time, then that should apply to the entire range of a game's content, optional super challenges and all. The peaks of the challenge graph are where lowered difficulty is probably needed the most, it makes the opposite of sense for those to be the only parts where difficulty can't be lowered.
Noticing fake faster movement: all the damn time. I'm speeding up because I want to spend less time holding the forward button, and when the time spent doing so doesn't change I would notice and get annoyed immediately, sometimes I even check to make sure the "sprint" isn't making me slower. I just attributed it to developer incompetence (as this is usually on small indie games), not that they were actually just fucking with me.
Noticing "random" chances not being actually random: all the damn time. I'm a save-scummer so when I reload a 70% chance 15 times and still don't get it, I notice and get annoyed about having to load the thing 15 times.
Noticing difficulty drops: usually. If it's a difficult game and I'm figuring out patterns of a boss and experimenting to see what I can get away with, it becomes much more apparent when suddenly the boss is standing around a lot more and I get annoyed waiting for it to attack so I can try out my counter-strategy.
Strategy game AI cheats: obviously. Aside from the fact that most games nowadays blatantly state what advantages the AI gets on higher difficulties, when you're actually beating their door down and see a complete lack of infrastructure to support the amount of crap they were pumping out is a pretty obvious tell that they were pulling resources out of their ass.
Save scum punishing mechanics are different from artificial randomness.
Some games roll BEFORE you make decision to prevent save scumming. In some of them you might have just saved AFTER roll was done, but before you saw the effect.
I would hope that if the computational capacity can be afforded to it, I'd much rather have the npcs in fps games or 3rd person adventure titles to have that processing of actually searching instead of wallhacks and lying. Honestly i probably wouldn't notice the difference but it's definitely a more affirming satisfaction if i trick an npc or hide successfully that was deliberately trying to get to me instead of knowing where i eas exactly and then putting on a show.
Rubber banding being so obvious is the big reason I don't play racing games
I think a more interesting approach would be stage hazards. Like you’re going through a construction site and a gender falls down. It can try to balance the playing field and keep it interesting (being in first for 3 laps isn’t fun), but if you’re skilled and paying attention you can avoid it. So it’s not a guaranteed penalty.
When games cheat, and it's noticeable? I basically write the game off in that exact minute. I return them if I can, and I take down previously good reviews to leave negative ones.
It feels like a con-artist trick basically 100% of the time, I think less of the devs who put this into their games...and assume they've always been doing this, even when it comes to advertising or other ethical consideration. In an age where games are ALSO manipulating for loot boxes and trying to lie during press cycles? Game devs don't get the benefit of the doubt; it always feels abusive, and it is never good.
Please don't start putting ambush ads in the middle of the video.
Personally I hate it. When I play a game I assume that the rules are set and won't change. I don't want a game to become easier if I struggle, or harder if I'm good just to give me a false impression of success/failure.
If you die 10 times against a boss and then the game turns easy mode on, you didn't beat the boss, the game let you win, like we let little kids win because they have no chance against adults ( and it's good for their moral and self-confidence ).
If I carefully explore a level, save on ammo, stock everything in a chest, and then the game makes the enemies harder to kill because I have too much ammo, I feal cheated, all my efforts went in vain, I could have just ignored the ammo and enemies would be easier to kill.
Changing the rules is bullshit.
An RTS/Strategy game from thirty years ago cheating is more understandable cause they didn't have the tech to make good AI that would fit on a PC. Nowadays, you can just program better AI
I think there should be a much greater degree of transparency in the adjustments made for gamefeel, for one it would teach potential developers how games actually operate while playing and for two I think way too many people have "protagonist of reality" syndrome. See: all the dummies who think summoning in elden ring (a core mechanic) is cheating.
My dear boy, I think you have discovered why souls likes are growing popular.
Video games, by nature of what they are, train your pattern recognition. After you train your pattern recognition to a certain extent, you can see through the developer lies. After that, tension becomes anticlimax. Excitement turns to disgust. Victory rings hollow.
Thus, when people like this find a souls like, they find a game that isn't lying to them. No matter how much pattern recognition they use, they can't find a single lie. They lost because they deserved to lose. And that brings an odd sense of satisfaction. The game tells them if you cannot get past this point with your skills and upgrades, then you don't deserve to. Players then find Souls likes to be honest and refreshing.
Every time i see a game cheat, i quit that game. It isnt fun. Especially for games with numerical stats. It feels better to absolutely body the AI than to have it cheat to make me struggle. Meanwhile if the game cheats to make the ai worse, thats un-earned victory, and i dont want it.
I remember Command and Conquer, where you could sandbag areas and block the AI. Once after i bled the AI dry i let a single harvester out, it ended up making units 4-5x the amount of credits one load would get.
I feel like your argument is that we should lie to players because they have stupid thoughts and can't handle the truth. But have you considered that maybe lying to players all the time is what led them to become brain-poisoned in the first place? I'd like to argue that constantly lying to players is bad not only for games but for human civilization as a whole tbh.
Part of being a game developer is protecting the players from themselves. All these comments going "I HATE BEING LIED TO. GIVE IT TO ME STRAIGHT" are lying to themselves. They'd throw their controllers in frustration and call the game cheap if the game was real with them. Everybody think they're hot shit and big boys until they miss their 12th shot in Xcom and rage quit with tears in their eyes.
I accuse people in general of being brain-poisoned by cheaty games, and your response is to say that they're crybabies.
Maybe if XCOM wasn't actively encouraging people to internalize gambler's fallacies then there'd be fewer people dying destitute of gambling addictions.
I've noticed games lying to me, the RTS example really got to me and actually *did* get me to quit! A strong early game Civilisation game had me eye up my passive NPC neighbour with my relatively excellent army, only to walk straight into instantly-spawned units. It felt and still feels wrong, being 'punished' for aggressive tactices.
Lying to the player is often a good thing, but you must be *damn* sure you won't be caught out doing so or your entire world falls apart and we're aware it's all smoke and mirrors behind the screen.
I've always noticed the rubber banding in any racing game. N64 Pod-racing was especially bad at hiding it, for one example. Fed up with it at a young age, I've had zero interest in any racing game ever since.
Sometimes if a game is being too punishing or annoying I just stop playing and watch to see what the game does when the player stops moving. It's really telling when you have these mobs waiting around for you to react.
When I found out about the Xcom lie, it did change the game for me, I stopped even looking at the percentage and just treated every shot as a coin flip. I think some people would really be put off by it.
Seeing that title: Everything alright at home mate?
Things are heating up at SW HQ aright💀💀
Things at home are getting Frosty.
I like my games to be honest with me, but maybe I'm just old-school like that.
Why are there soulslikes plastered all over this video? Souls games seem to be completely honest with you.
It's most videos. Starting to feel like it's all he plays.
The b roll is either a soulslike, Hollow Knight, or a recent Triple A trailer.
Oh, or Disco Elysium.
Too many video essays shove in any game footage as random B-roll to keep you engaged, rather than because it’s a relevant example. Part of it is trying to shorten time making the video by grabbing any random footage (especially if it’s a weekly video). And the other part is not really caring. Essentially treating videos as audio logs while bemoaning that they can’t have a black screen, otherwise people would probably leave. It’s kind of a lie in and of itself, that it’s there for a purpose relating to the argument when it could have been almost anything else.
Sort of depressing for folks who just keep dyeing anyways right?
This is part of why I prefer boardgames, sorry :) If I play Aeon Trespass and I miss on 1-4 and hit on 5-10, thats what i do. No hidden adjustments, no hidden systems, I know exactly whats up. And if I miss 4 times in a row, tough luck. Board games do just fine without all these wacky systems game designers believe are needed.
Some videogame lies are fine to me - like the famous coyote jump - but the stuff like difficulty settings via cheating or fake probabilities are where I outright check out.
After seeing the title, I immediately thought of trailers not matching gameplay.
Wow, I didn't expect this video to unironically advocate for Sid Meiering, i.e. "rolling actually low RNG is undesirable because it makes players feel bad". Should we allow players to learn what true randomness is, which is a really valuable skill not only in games but countless other aspects of real life? No, of course not, we should always coddle them like little babies.
I don't understand why a game making itself harder for skilled players would "feel more like actual lying". That kind of dynamic difficulty, that rewards skilled players with even more content and challenge, is one of the most fascinating and least explored aspects of difficulty that I know of.
Personally, I think this type of game design mentality is really toxic and irresponsible. Believe it or not, many players can take accountability with their own mistakes and are deserving of the respect of not being treated as babies. Some of the hardest games ever made, like Ikaruga, DoDonPachi Dai-Ou-Jou and Ninja Gaiden 2 are all perfectly honest about their difficulty without feeling the need to lie to the player.
If randomness cannot be both fun and honest, then it shouldn't be a gameplay element. Unless the game is about deception, then it can be allowed, but even then it needs to be honest about it's deception, because a game about deception isn't about being deceived, it is about figuring out how you're being deceived.
_"Some of the hardest games ever made, like Ikaruga, DoDonPachi Dai-Ou-Jou and Ninja Gaiden 2 are all perfectly honest about their difficulty without feeling the need to lie to the player."_
And they're niche titles, because very few people enjoy them.