Why Perfect Difficulty Is Impossible
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- Опубликовано: 26 июн 2024
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What is difficulty? and why can no-one seem to agree on it? Well, The Architect thinks that we're coming at the subject from the wrong end of the stick.
There's no better game to help prove it than monster hat making simulator, Monster Hunter World, a game that has some interesting struggles with difficulty and challenge.
You Saw:
XCOM 2 War of the Chosen: 2017
Monster Hunter World: 2018
Mini Metro: 2015
Divinity Original Sin 2: 2017
Into the Breach: 2017
Civilization 6: 2016
Wolfenstein 2: 2017
Minecraft: 2009
Resident Evil 4: 2005
Anno 2070: 2011
Spelunky: 2012
Dead Cells: 2017
Warcraft 3: 2002
Factorio: 2012
left for dead 2: 2009
Rimworld: 2013
Forged Battalion: 2018
What Remains of Edith Finch: 2017
Dota 2 kind of: 2013
Interesting Links:
Interview with the MH World Director: www.gamasutra.com/view/news/3...
Here's how nuts factorio gets: www.pcgamer.com/see-what-a-fa...
Semi-related to dead cells but this whole plagarism drama is amazing: kotaku.com/ign-pulls-ex-edito... 
Игры
![Remble - Colors (ft. Mozzy & Stoneda5th) [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/KF-3AU9g9xg/mqdefault.jpg)
You need to be *extremely* careful if you plan on modulating your difficulty like Resident Evil 4 does... because if the player ever finds out you're making the game easier because they're struggling then it robs the player of the accomplishment of beating a particularly difficult portion of the game because the game itself was pulling it's punches and letting the player win, and that's not fun.
Kevin Griffith Yeah, you're totally right. I recntly played Smash Bros Brawl's story mode on the hardest setting, but I quickly realized that when you started dying, the game would drop the difficulty. It sucked because there wasn't a way to disable the modular setting. I just wanted to play what I picked, but if the difficulty was going to dip after two deaths than what's the point?
Here's hoping that the (alleged) story mode in Smash Ultimate fixes that. And on a side note, I seriously hope they disable items for singleplayer mode.
Seems like those games try really hard to not loose their audience. In a way I understand that, but if you setup your difficulty high or the game is known for being hard it shouldn't give any slack for the player. Challenge is what makes games fun to enjoy, lack there of makes it boring, unless if the core mechanic and gameplay is about something else like narrative and story, then it might be worth playing for those reasons.
Games should be up front about this and if you can choose a hard setting, it shouldn't drop you behind your back, without having options to tell it not to.
This practice is very widespread in almost all AAA games these days. It ranges from AI tweaks to more item drops when health is low to outright making a combat encounter easier by removing enemies. And it all comes down to flow theory. Challenge comes from trying to do something that is just outside the upper limit of your current skills. So the game adjusting itself to always be in that place is a good thing for the majority of players. It's a really good design practice.
As per the original comment, it can make players feel ripped off if they find out the game is doing it which is a danger. I think this is why the more health pickups when your health is low approach is quite popular.
Also I agree that there should be some form of toggle to turn off the dynamic aspect of the difficulty setting. Very few people would use it but it's there for those who want it.
@@gamedesignwithmichael doom 2016 totally does the health thing. Glory kills will get you like 5 health at 80 health but like 60 health when you're at 5 health
I feel like the way we ask the player what difficulty they want is fundamentally flawed. We're asking the player to decide before they've even played the first minute of the game if it's too easy or too hard for them. Sure, you can change the difficulty at any time... but bringing the difficulty down always tastes like admitting defeat, and nobody wants to be beaten by a few lines of code. We could do with a few games that let you get a taste of what the baseline gameplay experience is, and then ask after that if they would like the game to be easier or harder, now that they have some inkling of what's ahead of them.
I'm 100% guilty of not having fun on a harder difficulty to protect my pretend video game honour like an idiot.
I think Darkest Dungeon has a good solution for that. Going torchless will make the dungeon harder but increase the rewards. Thus the player can choose to make the mission harder or easier if they want to take the risk.
SciVoid it's an interesting system, but it falls into the trap that most games that reward skilled play do. It defeats the purpose of bonus challenges to give advantages to the most capable players (Like getting more loot by willingly facing more difficult challenges) while leaving the less capable ones without the same advantages... but we have to reward bonus challenges with *something*. The best rewards for skill, in my opinion, are time saves (being able to progress to more challenging content faster through shortcuts) and bonus content (more difficult levels unlocked by completing challenges, possibly as a post-game bonus challenge).
Kevin Griffith
That sounds more like the player is thinking the wrong way about difficulty. "I don't want to turn down the difficulty because that means admitting defeat" - no, you should turn down the difficulty to enjoy the experience, there is no glory in playing on a high difficulty.
And adaptive difficulties are incredibly hard to nail as they require *much* more than just switching numbers around which means it also takes a lot more resources.
I think the idea that every game needs to have a fitting difficulty for every kind of player is fundamentally flawed. No other medium or any challenge in general exists that fulfills this criteria. If a book is too simple for you, you put it away and get more thought provoking literature. If a movie is too simple for you, you watch a different one.
It is perfectly fine for a game to be too hard or too easy for some players because the alternative of having an adaptive difficulty would mean that the developer would have to put exponentially more work into creating these proper challenges for minimal gain.
I absolutely agree that it can be beneficial to turn the difficulty down if it's ruining your experience with the game, but there's a psychological resistance to it. This is different from person to person, so you might not experience this, but winning because you reduced the difficulty doesn't really feel like a win to me... and the satisfaction of winning is absolutely part of the reward of beating any challenge in a game.
I also don't think that ALL games should try to cater to a broad range of skill levels, but being more open to players of varying skill levels is usually a good idea, especially if the difficulty itself isn't the main draw to your game. Even Dark Souls has a variable difficulty of sorts, being able to summon other players to tackle bosses or sections of world you can't beat solo. In the end, almost all game designers want their game to be experienced fully by as many people as possible, and scalable difficulty is just another tool for accessibility.
Hey, don't diss Dwarf Fortress' emotional nuance. There is nothing that tugs your heartstrings more than having to send a mother, child in hand, to fight an eldritch abomination or to kill your own dogs to have enough meat to survive the winter.
This may be late but it is completely true. If you play as a heartless overseer who sees dwarves as slaves to armok and pawns to your schemes, then you can play like that. But each dwarf has their own mood, preference, history, dream and family. Should you follow a couple of dwarves through your forts growth, you will have a narrative handed to you in plate and oh boy can it get bad depending on how it plays out
The argument you provide for why 'walking sims' provide challenge could very easily be applied to movies and books as well.
Correct! Whilst I wanted to keep things to videogames for ease, challenge is a factor in pretty much anything we find enjoyable.
Adam Millard - The Archtiect of Games
That makes me question why you think that games could somehow have an adaptive difficulty to create an appropriate challenge for every player.
Challenge can be found in everything in life - be it intellectual or physical challenges. There are certain activities/problems that are difficult for people with a certain "level of skill" with the corresponding ability. And in real life we also look for different problems that are a more appropriate challenge for our abilities.
How could games realistically fix this problem when no other creative medium ever managed to fix it?
There are movies and books with huge potential for interpretation and abstract thought and most people aren't able to decipher it, thus the "challenge" in this regard is too high for many people. It's too difficult for them and they miss out on that experience.
And while video games are a far more adaptive medium, I do not see how you can create a flexible difficulty that caters to any skill level of a given player without having exponentially more work to do for every challenge you put in your game. Those challenges need to be fine tuned, simple numerical changes won't do. A boss with 50% more health and 100% more damage is technically more difficult but it doesn't create a bigger challenge for the player that understands the bosses moveset. It only increases the length of the fight and might raise tension because there is less margain for error but ultimately it is a trivial increase in challenge and a much bigger increase in frustration.
So if we are talking for example action RPGs ala Dark Souls the bosses would need to get less predictable and have faster and more complex attack patterns so that the player need to react faster and has to comprehend more. That would keep it challenging but this is incredibly costly in both time and resources and also a far worse aplication of those resources because only a minority of players will get to see it.
So even with the adaptive capabilities of the medium I do not see a truly variable challenge become a reality in games any time soon.
I finished more video games than books in the last couple of years.
Books are more of an (undesirable) challenge that's just not worth it imho.
Luminescence I think when dealing with experienced players, instead of making the early bosses hard, you can instead provide different paths for them to take with a different difficulty curve. For instance, in Dark Souls you could have a different, harder boss that then opens into the regular one with a high jump and enough buffs to one shot it. A new player might avoid this boss after getting pummeled, since there’s another way, an experienced player will fight this boss.
And sleep
Actually you touched on an entirely different kind of challenge at the end when talking about dealing with monster hunter: self imposed challenge is just as valid an option, and games can very much be tailored to take it into account.
Minecraft doesn't have too much of a challenge, in creative mode there is none. So just about everything is a self imposed problem. Even the fact that you are playing the game is self imposed.
Welcome to pros playing Pokémon games with nuzlocke rukes
Still, there's no self-imposed help
Pokemon games are not only a hotspot for self-imposed challenges (Nuzlocke being by far the most popular, but there are other very interesting rulesets out there, like mono-type, no grinding, etc), but they're also great at keeping it manageable for less skilled players. If you take time to explore, it's not hard to find Pokemon that are immediately recognizable as exceptionally strong that can carry you through large portions of the game. The game's main legendary is usually this Pokemon, but other examples include Gible from D/P/Pt, the Swords Of Justice (or whatever tf that trio is called) from B/W/B2/W2, and the gifted Mega Lucario in X/Y. A struggling player can find one of these Pokemon and add them to their team to get past whatever was troubling them. But veterans to the series can choose to not use them and make the game a bit more challenging. It's not really dynamic difficulty so much as it is allowing players to choose their difficulty in a much better way than just "hurr durr here's 3 difficulty options and you have no idea what they actually change better pick now because you can't change it later!"
I think this is a bigger problem the more expensive the game was to develop. When you're sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into a project it's tempting to want every single player to see every bit of content, and that means turning it into a 40-hour long tutorial level.
Yeah, defining 'difficulty' and 'challenge' in this manner actually seems pretty useful! If only we had had it for all the 'is Dark Souls Difficult?' videos on youtube before eh? :P
i found the first dark souls challenging but fair, the second was way more difficult ( i don't know why the majority of people say DS 2 is easier ) , too difficult even.
I've long been on the opinion that Dark Souls isn't "difficult" or "hard" - a better word for it, I think, is "unforgiving." Once you learn how to play the game, it's all doable with a bit of tenacity. It just that the game won't cut you any slack.
Bet you didn’t even play the original monster hunter on the wii, that is whole new difficulty level
@@agent-sz2qj I honestly couldn't tell much of a mechanical difference between Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2 and Demon's Souls. I did have an easier time getting through the latter ones but that's because I knew what I was doing at that point.
Otherwise it was always just: "Collect souls, level up, get loot, learn how bosses move and keep trying until they die." I know DS2 has some slightly different combat mechanics but most of them always struck me as minor.
@@agent-sz2qj It's just a matter of perspective. I started off with DS2 and found it extremely difficult requiring 3 playthroughs before I actually beat the game all the way with all the dlcs. DS1 was more relaxed and rigid. I found it easier
Difficulty in games is much more complex than "easy" "normal" "hard"
Damage Multipliers
AI Intelligence/efficiency
Level of Complexity
Does the the difficulty adapt to the players actions?
Does the become harder or easier when you progress?
Are players given several ways to overcome challenges or do they have to do one thing just right?
Do players need knowledge to overcome the challenge or just raw skills?
+ more
Or just" easier ,easy ,normal ,hard ,harder "
I always had a problem with rubber band Difficulty, because like matchmaking in Dota I realized that I have no point in getting better, because the game will just increase it's difficulty and put me right where I started, also, weirdly enough it feels more 'real' when enemies have consistent HP, or when items aren't generated but always exist in an area when you start a new game.
I don't get you at the point where you say that consistency feels more real. Everything that is real is changing and falling apart.
Huh? That last bit caught me off guard. Well a good example is in the game 'S.T.A.L.K.E.R.' there's a hidden mercenary armored jacket at the start of the game, which makes your life a lot easier. It's always there, to me it makes sense, because some stalker in the game's world must have put it there, so it would always be there.
As a contrast, Divinity - Original Sin had a.... "personality?" system for your 2nd created character (you could chose to play with 1 or 2 OC's) and the 2nd character would randomly second guess your decisions sometimes, which in itself was a good thing to give character to the other...uh..character, but I could just load my game right before I did that same action and this time the other character wouldn't object, meaning their 'personality' isn't consistent, and that they aren't real. If they really had that character trait, they would always object to me not stealing that inheritance money. So inconsistent..'stuff' reminds me that I'm just playing a game.
I hope that makes more sense.
I’d say that rather than trying to find a perfect difficulty that fits everyone, games should just focus on making “losses” less frustrating.
For example, I’d never played a platformer in my life when I started playing Hollow Knight. I basically kept dying to everything, yet the game simply put me back in the last bench with less geo. There was also a mechanic to get back my Geo. This told me “dying is a part of the game, you’re going to die a lot.” And thus when I died I took it as part of the process of beating the game, not as “doing something wrong.” Of course I died because I did something wrong but the game clearly doesn’t expect me to do everything right first time.
Part of this process is good feedback. If players know what they did wrong, they’ll want to try again and not do it. If players have no idea why the fuck they just died they might just rage quit and say the game is stupid.
So I’d say that when people say a game is too hard, they don’t really mean a game is too hard. They mean a game isn’t doing a good enough job of teaching itself and is providing incorrect expectations. For instances, I gave up on Dark Souls I multiple times because I have no idea how I’m supposed to beat the bridge boss. Not because the bridge boss (it’s like the first non-tutorial one) seems too hard, I have a lot of ideas on how to beat it, but because the save points is very far from the boss fight, and when I have a new idea to try... I have to first beat a quite challenging level for me which involves scaling multiple towers to take out archers. It reminds me of the worst Hollow Knight boss, in the Water ways. The boss is really easy with the best nail, but really hard without it, and the path towards it is insanely not fun. To the point that everyone either skips the boss or abuses a glitch to beat it.
I think there’s a lot to be said about devs being aware of how a player will feel after failure. The ideal feeling is a sense of challenging frustration. The players should feel mad at their own skills, not at the game. The first time anyone plays against Nightmare Grimm they’ll get pummeled. Yet the fight is very fun because as a dream fight you can just keep trying without any set-backs. That sort of awareness goes a long way in making a game feel challenging, not impossible. It’s a balance. If losing has little consequences the players might realize that the challenge is just fake. If you can always recover from death, then dying is meaningless. But I think it’s a balance that can be achieved.
Games should know how challenging they want to be, and then teach the player to get good. Sequels provide an interesting challenge as advanced players and new players will be going through the same game, and thus a scaling difficulty curve won’t provide a flatlined challenge curve. I feel like these problems can be solved in interesting ways, though. Consider, for instances, a Hollow Knight sequel. Simply adding additional zones protected by tough platforming sections right at the start would be enough. New players won’t even realize those are possible, while old players will instantly go there and face a challenge that new players will only find later into their adventure. Make these special bosses into evil Grubs and now I really want to play that game.
Kathy Kat
Id like to add that a high death penalty/ making failure extremely frustrating is also an interesting way to set up real stakes for the player.
I am more of a strategy player and there are few things I have enjoyed as much as an ironman EU4 campain. They often take up to 20 hours and mistakes can cause setbacks that break the whole run. Yes that is frustrating. And after loosing a run to a mistake you will often stop playing the game for weeks, but eventually you come back.
Extremely well said, I am still absolutely baffled that I have yet to see a competitive multiplayer game where losses are not bad, every game out there treats winning as a success and loss as failure without any middle ground. Even the games that have you collect points always end in all the points being added up and deciding the winner. The best I have seen is those points being shown at the end for you yo judge on your own but the thing you judge is really the large red DEFEAT you see.
I know you probably wont go back to souls any time soon, but in the event you ever do. Remember that enemies are a waste of resources, avoiding them can be very beneficial. Running past content to make it to bosses after a loss is a massive part of the game's concept. I'm not judging or anything, just wanted to let you know what worked for me in the event you try again.
In all fairness, Dark Souls is usually good with providing shortcuts to the boss or permanently removing a difficult challenge in the way of the boss once you've overcome that challenge (the Channeler in Undead Parish is a great example of the latter). Taurus Demon is one of the exceptions to the rule, and most issues in this regard were fixed by the time Bloodborne rolled around.
RE4 had a thing called "dynamic " difficulty. you can see it in speedruns and no death runs....people intentionally missing and getting hit to "milk the goodies"..
Eg, if you do good, the game gets harder(more HP, accurate enemy attacks, less criticals and drops etc). If you suck vice versa.
But the thing is, it made it more fun. Its not "oh game, bdsm the shit out of me" or "a gentle stroll through the park".....
The better you get ,the tougher it becomes to ensure you are having fun. I dont know of any other games that had that, but its why re4 is a masterpiece in my book. The new re, didnt have any of that. Fixed spawns, fixed HP, limited behavior etc. It was dumbed down to ramp up the scare factor...miserably....
I know that dark souls doesnt have that. But if it had, if you were doing bad, enemies would be pushovers. if you were doing good(high level, humanity on etc)...enemies should gank and beat the shit out of you. So the running technique wouldn't work....
I think a good way to do difficulty is to have a “learner” mode, which makes tutorials clearer and even softens the difficulty at first. That way, the main part of the game still feels challenging and real.
Note: obviously this should be a selectable mode.
One thing I would like to point out about variable difficulty: the concept of skill requirement vs skill ceiling. I've been watching a lot of Ceave Gaming's content, and it's a BIG thing with the Mario games design philosophy.
Skill requirement is the level of skill required to complete a task. For example, in a Mario game, there's usually a fairly obvious path, often deliniated by a billion coins, that indicates a relatively simplistic path of progression. This path generally doesn't require the advanced jumping mechanics that you'll see speedrunners abusing maliciously, but it'll get you through the game just fine.
Skill ceiling is the level of skill that's possible under the game mechanics. It's where you get advanced features like wall jumping and the insane Cappy-dive-jump thing in Mario Odessey, or the shell double-jump trick in Super Mario World, or Wavedashing and the Short-hop-fast-fall-L-cancelled air attacks in Super Smash Bros Melee. Sometimes it's a glitch - the wavedash in Melee being the prominent example - but often they're intended mechanics that are added in on top of regular gameplay in order to give you more options for high level play.
Games that are designed to have a wide spread between skill requirement and skill ceiling appeal to a much wider range of players, because the low end is low enough to fit for relatively casual players, while the high end leaves room for those who enjoy high level skill challenges.
(Dark Souls is actually another good example of this, though even its low end is quite high. A lot of the ranged options allow for a much easier experience than the close-in-and-dodge-everything approach that most people thinking of Dark Souls expect, whereas the dodge-and-counter style people generally think of is pretty much as hard as you can make it short of deliberately denying yourself statistical upgrades.)
Unfortunately both difficulty and challenge are very subjective. Ultimately nobody really enjoys the same levels of either.
A big part of how difficulty modes affects challenge also comes in how a difficulty mode changes gameplay itself. Often playing on a higher difficulty level doesn't make the game feel more challenging, it often just means you either have to do the same thing for a longer period (see for example skyrim where they just turn things into damage sponges), or just force you to min-max more while still playing exactly the same way.
I remember not enjoying the new Thief game, but I could really appreciate how it allowed you to make your own 'custom' difficulty by tweaking certain settings. Meaning you could make the parts you enjoy or found too easy more difficult, while keeping the parts you find too much of a hassle on a more manageable scale. Such things can create a challenge you'd personally enjoy.
Not everyone enjoys the same kind of challenge, either,, which is fine. But challenge is one of the most important drivers to why a game is fun in my opinion. Some types of challenge can also severely limit the way the game allows you to play. I still remember disliking master mode for its regeneration feature, which essentially forces you into a singular play style (keep hitting it otherwise your damage was for naught).
Difficulty often gets a bad rap when it feels unfair or artificial, which in turn makes the challenge feel illegitimate. Which can be completely justified. Similarly, challenge is faced with the task of making something feel both compelling and satisfying. And I think that will ultimately also come down to how the game allows you to tackle the challenge.
I think game development will have a difficult and long task perfecting this fully.
I think letting the player modulate the difficulty is one of the ways to go forward. Instead of *hiding* what difficulty does like most games do, *show* it to us so we can adjust it to our liking. There are a lot of games that could have been a lot more fun if only there was an option to modify a setting or two, of which a modern example is Timers in XCOM 2: Some people hate the in-mission timers with a passion because part of their fun is lining everything up perfectly and hitting the Execute button and see how the dice fall (meaning you spend an extra turn moving just one tile, thus "wasting time"), while others enjoy the pressure and memorizing tile layouts and enemy placements while utilizing the mechancis to scout and set up hard hitting attacks when the aliens trigger.
Meanwhile, some enjoy said pressure on the world map where you're in a constant long term struggle to take down bases to not hit a game over screen, optimizing their research paths and so forth while others despise it because their fun is optimizing a custom team to hit fast and hard, which requires way more research than the timer normally allows for. As an example, I love the in-mission timers but loathe the overworld timer. My fun is setting up an optimized team that's essentially my IRL friends, each exploiting a feature to the max (eg. a sniper, heavy gunner, scout etc). I essentially thrive on nuking the enemy on the same turn I trigger them and moving on. One of the giant DLC monsters showing up is *extra* fun to me, not an "OMG, this will make me more likely to fail due to timers" moment. On the other hand, I prefer the overworld stress coming from aliens invading my base or lack of funding if I'm too passive like the older games, rather than just arbitrarily hitting a Game Over screen because the devs decided I'm playing it incorrectly. Thankfully, modders have fixed the issues both ways, disabling or extending in-mission timers and/or overworld timer.
Basically, what this thesis-length comment is aiming for is that I'd have way more fun if I had the option to tweak certain aspects of the game: Remove the Game Over timer and maybe increase Terror Missions to force me out of hiding now and then. Also allowing me to add some more aliens or tweak their settings to give more of a challenge to wipe the floor with them once we start fighting.
Ideally, the devs set the difficulty on their own and let us play for a few hours to get a feel for it and then the option to tinker with stuff appears. Some games can't do this, of course, namely those with multiplayer components that overlap with singleplayer (MonHun and Souls, for instance). However, they could perhaps steal aspects from Dark Souls 2, where there was a harder NG+, Champion's Covenant for further challenges, "no death" rewards and so forth. Things that don't alter the enemies themselves but rather add to the world overall.
Most often difficulty is about having a fast reaction time, and being able to memorize button combinations in your spine. With other words, it's challenging your *skill*. There used to be a time when I enjoyed that. But no longer. Today I play games on normal, find them very easy, and love it. I hate challenges. I only want an experience, and entertainment.
When a game insults me for difficulty settings i play on very easy. When it says it's ok to play on easy i play on insane.
It's funny
Seriously I am so thankful I finally found this channel. I have often been confused as to why I don't fit into 1 genre and why I like the things I do. Not just this video but your entire channel focuses on why I've been struggling to find new games! I can go on and on but all can be summed up to this...you have a new subscriber. Thank you for your incredible insight and awesome content. Can't wait to binge your channel.
Your videos always so damn awesome and thought provoking!
I need to start recommending you to literally everyone I know who is interested in games, because your videos are just that great.
I am less of a fan of “reactive” difficulty then having granular difficulty options. If a game gives me the ability to change the difficulty of as many aspects of the game as possible then I will tailor it to what I find enjoyable. I still think “reactive” difficulty is better then just having some vague global settings that hold very little useful information.
your choice of game music for your videos is great!
Hi. Love the channel. I just want to say that your insights have given me new ideas in my writing so THANKS!
Should variable difficultly be toggable for those who derive genuine achievement from completing the hardest difficultly, even if it might be unreasonable?
I'd say so, a lot of the games I mentioned do actually have super hard modes for exactly that reason, it's all about tailoring the experience and sometimes "as hard as it can possibly get" is what people are looking for.
Related to this, there have been times when I have come across a specific challenge and would keep getting close to overcoming it, but fail before I did. Each attempt I would get closer than the one before it, and during the process of repeatedly failing, I thought "I really hope there's no dynamic difficulty adjustments on this" because I was really enjoying losing and figuring out what I needed to do better. There's a very thin line between enjoying losing while steadily progressing and just wanting that f'ing cheating bastard of a game to let me get back to having fun. I think an option that the player can control may be the only way to allow the former while avoiding the latter.
Variable difficulty should never be used because it always fucks up the game.
I need no channel youtube! And once you realize it’s there it starts to feel like the game is tying it’s hand behind its back just to let you feel a sense of accomplishment. Not to mention how exploitable it can become
Another amazing video by Adam Millard. Keeping the viewer interested while also learning something. Keep it up buddy!
Don't you diss dwarf fortress you damn elf!
Great video. I agree. I've been playing "Shadow Tactics" the last few days & I've really enjoyed it. The first time you do a mission you do what you feel like, then you get some badges - and more importantly get to find out which ones you didn't get (this information is totally sealed before beating a map once) which allows you (if you want to master the systems) go back to the map and try to get some or all of the once you missed. I think it's a really great way to allow more advanced players to challenge themselves higher that doesn't impact the fun for a regular player. Of course this also has the 3 difficulty settings (only 2 of which earn badges), but it's a great way to add some nuance to it without making people choose between a bunch of difficulty settings without any context for how good they are.
I think that Monster Hunter World is a very interesting showcase here. I got into it because of friends, and my first impressions were in multiplayer using the bow (ranged) only. I remember screaming and flailing and feeling horribly bad at it, because those huge monsters looked and were that scary (note, I had no prior knowledge of, or experience with, any Monster Hunter game).
Then I decided to create a new char and do the entire MSQ all over, using the insect glaive, full solo. Boy, did that teach me how to play the game. Granted, I learned some tricks through RUclips (and I think it's good that intricacies can and should be shared between players), but I also learned to calm the heck down and observe the monsters (rather than screaming my head off at them). I learned to see patterns and how to respond to them, I learned to use the dodge mechanic far better than I ever did, etc.
Once, and only once, I got into the groove of the game, did I appreciate how well it scales up its difficulty and teaches a new player how the game works. Iceborne, in turn, provides an even greater challenge compared to the base game with new mechanics to use, and progressing through it has made me a better player still. Were I to start a new character now, the base game MSQ would likely feel like a slog, but I'd feel a lot better and confident smashing through the mobs and trying to beat my timers that time round.
Is it a difficult game? I would say it's difficult to get into. Is it a challenging game? Absolutely, especially when progressing to the next tier of monster. Is the endgame overwhelming and grindy? I'd say yes, but that's a different discussion.
9:30 I like that you use the Factorio music when explaining RimWorld, because it actually fits that game more in my opinion :D
Awesome video! Another game that does reactive difficulty really well is Dishonored 2. If your playstyle is more stealthy, there will be fewer enemies close together so that you can quietly take them down one by one without being detected. If your playstyle is more confrontational, the game will spawn more enemies per level so that you can slaughter your foes in bloody combat. It's a really cool way of making the game more fun to play with different playstyles.
That's great, but perhaps "game-style reactive" rather than difficulty reactive?
I love everything you do!
Have you tried any of the grand strategy paradox games like eu iv? Those games often have a different challenge (not necessarily more difficult but you have to find another way of doing things) depending on which nation you start as. They also have a difficulty setting lately but I find that a very good way of giving players new challenging things to do and figured its worth a mention in sucha video.
I dislike reactive games. Feels like whenever i or my character/s improve i just get setback and it encourages me to do poorly in order to get rewarded instead of the opposite. Like running on a treadmill i don't feel like i get anywhere.
Well a good reactive difficulty should be like good matchmaking in a ranked system. The purpose is to provide a difficulty curve that is rewarding and improves your skills without beating you down. It should always challenge you to do better, but it shouldn't beat you to a bloody pulp. Ideally, playing at a higher level is more fun as you discover new and better ways to play, and throwing the game to make things easier should take away the challenge and accomplishment that make it fun. Unfortunately this can be extremely difficult to create, especially when you need a mixture of different challenge levels to add variety to a game.
I get that same feeling it can make you feel like you not gaining progression or skill. It can also cheapen the boss challenges.
I think the revenge system in MetalGearSolidPhantomPain was a cool idea bcause it forced the player to switch up their strategy at least.
I’m very glad you didn’t delete the helium fart joke 😂
The best difficulty level system I've seen is in Super Mega Baseball 3 (yes, really.) They have an "Ego" system that goes from 0 to 99. That much granularity means that players can pull the boiled-frog effect on themselves. If the game's way too easy, jump it up by 5 or even 10 levels. But then, as you approach the sweet spot, you can move it by just a couple of points and adjust to the new difficulty.
They've also broken it out into four separate game systems-batting, pitching, fielding (meaning the strength of the fielding assist rather than players dropping routine fly balls like Little Leaguers, a nice touch), and baserunning. The player can fine-tune it on the molecular level because it's basically a slider with a hundred notches but represented with integers.
Any game can do this by considering what "Very Easy" and "Very Hard" look like and sliding the difference between one and the other very graduallly.
This is the first time I've seen a video about difficulty in games without mentioning Dark Souls.
I still hold Bastion up as one of, if not the, gold standard of modular difficulty. The Shrine where you can manually give bonuses to your enemies in exchange for earning bonus XP is fantastic. Plus, it's tied in so awesomely to the lore of the game.
I suppose giving the option to have certain gods make the game 'easier' for players who are struggling (ideally with a bit of clever wording that doesn't sound like you're 'admitting defeat' by dropping the difficulty) might have made the system even better, giving you the option to dynamically raise or lower the difficulty to your desired level, rather than just increasing it. Still though, it was fantastic, and still one of my favorite "playing like a designer" moments when I realized precisely what the Shrine was for.
I highly agree with this video. A very cool feature, I'd like to mention here, is the ability to change the parry frame in Star Wars: Lost Order. Instead of just changing the DMG and health of enemies in order to change difficulty, this game went one step further and let you change the difficulty of game mechanics! I think that's a way better way to de- / increase the challenge in a game.
nice closing line. i enjoyed the vid.
You deserve way more subscribers than you have right now. I love every single one of your analysis videos!!!
Great Video.
Thanks for uploading.
Are you planning to do a video on SupCom or FAF?
I had this crazy idea for a video game. Make the game "4 times", each representing how challenging you want the game. The main idea is that the easiest challenge mode has less mechanics and things to remember but the game is made specifically for this difficulty. The hardest challenge is the base game with all the mechanics the developers intended. Think Guitar Hero, the higher the difficulty means you have to strum more notes, it doesn't change the songs you play at all, it just means you have to strum more and more notes.
In the case of MHW, I think the campaign should have allowed the player a little more flexibility with his first hunts. While the Anjanath is set up as this big insurmountable obstacle, I think veteran players would have loved if the game gave you some incentive to face it early on and rewarded you for dealing with it before you were suppose to be prepared. Most of the zones have a very planned order of how you take out every major hunt target but a lot experienced players try to clear a zone in their first few hunts. The game if anything punishes you for this with tight quest timers. They could have done more with the rare drops and targeting enemy weakpoints as well. The capture mechanic could have been introduced earlier as well.
Quest timers are generally set at 50min, I wouldn't really call that tight.
Besides, there's a free roam mode that lets you farm ressources and hunt monsters if you so choose.
But I agree about the idea that they should have added a way for veteran players to breeze through the storyline.
The "kill the apex threat early and skip all the crap" idea is a very good one !
@@arenkai Actually I think "skipping all the crap" would have been a really bad idea because it let me focus on discovering the new mechanics and explore the new maps and world building, and I really enjoyed it. I think it's an important part of the game that should not be skipped.
Its my first Monster Hunter game and just SEEING the anjanath made me want to challenge him. And I did. And I felt rewarded for beeing able to craft the Anjanath stuff..
arenkai That literally goes against all of what monster hunter is.Hunt weaker monsters, then craft better armor and weapons and then hunt a stronger monster. That’s what the franchise has always done.
A great example of good scaling of challenge is actually in World of Warcraft, specifically the Ulduar raid from Wrath of the Lich King. Most of the bosses had a specific optional challenge that you had to go out of your way to beat, and in some cases had to be specifically activated beforehand. Hodir, one of the simplest, had a chest full of extra loot that could only be accessed by beating him in a certain amount of time. Mimiron had you push a big red self destruct button that gave the battle a time limit and added new mechanics. Yogg-Saron let you choose between 5 levels of challenge by letting you choose which buffs you could do without.
The best part of these hard modes were that they were well integrated into gameplay and into the world. Future instances had difficulty selected by clicking a button in a menu, but the Ulduar challenges were all activated by some gameplay mechanism (do damage fast enough, kill a specific target, even clicking buttons was done by interacting with game objects). They were also explained and given some context within the game. Not always the best context, but "You activated the self-destruct, beat Mimiron quick" is still better than "you clicked the harder difficulty setting", and the well done context really elevated fights like Thorim or Yogg-Saron. It's really a shame Blizzard stopped doing that kind of challenge selection so quickly, because it helped make Ulduar one of, if not the best raid in WoW
Dead in Vinland is a good example of a game that isn't "difficult" per se but definetely challenging
I love the way you edit your videos! What editor do you use?
A rudimentary knowledge of Adobe Premiere
I know its two years old now, maybe even close to three, but this is excellent. These thoughts on challenge and difficulty are helpful in thinking about what makes a game satisfying. Im a new content creator and have been making videos about the elder scrolls online, specifically off-meta build videos and I like my builds off-meta but useable specifically because they offer more freedom, are still useable, and never make end-game solo content so easy that it becomes boring. Many players and builders in the game make builds that are so optimized that the challenge the devs built into the content is entirely overcome by the power of the build. The thoughts here apply directly to self-nerfing. Its like not fast traveling in Skyrim or Fallout because it changes the way that the game challenges you.
you talked about walking-simulators in this video and was wondering: "what is you definition of a game", I ask because I follow totalbiscuit's his channel and he was of the opinion that walking-simulators weren't games because they didn't have a fail state. he did however categorize them as... I think he used the term "narrative experiences" and although he didn't like the genre he still appreciated some of them. now you clearly enjoy these games, so I wanted your opinion
That's one of the few things I disagreed with John on, defining games based on a win-loss state is needlessly restrictive, It'd be like saying that music without instruments isn't music. Failure states, or at least the impression of one is a crucial part to a lot of games but you can make great experiences without one.
Boblymon You said the reason it matters at the end of your post. If we don't agree on what the word "game" means, then we will have trouble talking about them. Definitions are necessary to convey thought. The problem which I think you are trying to convey (and I agree wholeheartedly to) is that people shouldn't take the definition of game seriously. No one should care if what they enjoy doesn't fall under the term "game" just like I don't care that X-Com isn't classified as a shooter even though the vast majority of the combat consists of trying to deny enemies cover and shoot them.
@@ArchitectofGames I agree, a win/loss state seems more important to the definition of a sport than anything. I think a game is more of a state of mind than any specific action.
There is no arguing over what a game is. A game has a win and a loss state, even a jiggsaw puzzle has a loss state. There is nothing wrong with Walking Simulators being Interactive Experiences. Just like a Visual Novel doesn't necessarily need to have game elements. Clinging on the definition of game for an interactive experience is wrong in my opinion, because it does serve no purpose other than to muddy the water. Its like calling Dota2 a MMO. MMO is a useful descriptor for something where you will end up interacting with a large number of people. You expect something like World of Warcraft and not something like Battlefield. As such it has a use to describe it for people that are looking for a World of Warcraft like experience. Similarly calling a walking simulator a game does the Walking Simulator a disservice, because people will come there and actually expect gameplay, but only find an interactive narration. Just because some people will be fine with not finding a game, doesn't it do a disservice to the game and all the negative reviews its gonna get for not being a game.
@@IshanDeston So tag isn't a game? My whole childhood is a lie..
Liked after the Fart joke at 1:45 ! You are amazing!
I think we should mention artificial difficulty has to be avoided. There's this thin line where difficulty meets unfairness, for example, a boss that takes too many hits and becomes boring mid way or the thing you've done with MH. You dont want the player to grind in order to overcome the quote unquote challenge, which relies in big numbers and/or gimmicky mechanics.
I guess you could do a video about it so this one is completed, or at least, even more complete. Am i the only one who wants you to talk about it?
That depends on the game but in most cases yes.
Re2 remake has that. Made it boring and tedious...
@Pablo Barea, If difficulty remains exactly the same, then mobs can become too predictable. When monsters do the exact same things, it becomes boring!
Oh, I find it very weird that you have a typed message, but still said "quote unquote" instead of just doing it.😅
For example: ...overcome the "challenge".
"Artificial difficulty" is kind of a misnomer. All difficulty in games is artificial, hopefully most of it is intentional but its all artificial. We use the term "Artificial" usually in place of uninteresting difficulty, (defeating 100 of the same enemies is a row is challenging, but not at all interesting) difficulty that harms game feel (bullet sponge enemies are challenging but not fun) or nonsensical difficulty (an enemy that used to be easy to fight suddenly has more health and deals more damage later in the game, because its later in the game)
These are all bad forms of difficulty, or at least not ideal, but using the catch all "artificial" is not very useful.
This reminds me of something.
There was this game, in fact among the first few i got on PC, Cyberia 2. It's mostly a rail shooter, fully prerendered, and it's got about one and a half hours worth of gameplay/footage across two CDs, and the video is separated into background layer and overlays with destructible objects and enemies, and the transition when you shoot something or someone down when the layer is turned off is masked with some sprites on top. The save files were tiny so i thought, what's the worst that could happen, and did some poking with a hex editor. I quickly found which values changed whenever i completed a level (checkpoint number) and then i found that there was another value that increased every time i played or failed a level - could have been a counter, could have been a measure of time. Poking around some more i discovered that the game has dynamic difficulty of sorts, the more often you fail, the fewer enemies and obstacles you will encounter! Welcome too, because you plain don't get enough blaster charge and time to shoot even close to every enemy you can across much of the game.
Actually balancing this system should be ridiculously easy. I mean, you have some value of how long the game should take at most, the least skilled player, let's say 50 hours. If someone has 0 failures, they get the full load, and if someone has completed a certain percentage of the game and has failures that amount to that portion of the maximum amount of time, they get the bare minimum, and everyone else gets something in between. And if you set finishing time high enough above the minimum, the difficulty adjustment will be gradual enough that they likely won't even ever notice. Of course if the game just lets you sit in place where nothing happens, that needs adjustment to just take into account the amount of deaths and the amount of time estimated by the game designer that the player loses from their progress each death, but it can still work.
Third problem wasn't addressed enough
Personally I prefer different difficulty levels for different genres. If it's a horror game, ramp that difficulty up. I want to be terrified. If it's a hack and slash I want it middle-of-the-road, challenging enough so that I have to put some effort into it but easy enough so that I can feel like a badass as I slice enemies limb from limb. But then there are some games that work well for being easy like Tearaway, Journey and others, as it fits the theme of being a relaxing, serene experience.
As many have said, though, difficulty and challenge are two different things. A game can super difficult but enjoyable and rewarding, while another much easier game might be super frustrating.
SohJinh: Well that depends. I've heard people (cough cough Yahtzee cough cough) defend jumpy combat and the like in horror games. Look, I get it - horror games shouldn't be like Warframe where you just zoom right through the stage and murder everything in your path with relative ease.
...but a horror game shouldn't be like the first couple Resident Evils or Alone in the Dark where I'm fighting with the tank controls. Or the first couple Silent hills where I'm telling the game "Come on. Move. Out of my way. Run. MOOOOOOVE!". Or even the first couple Clock Tower games where I'm constantly struggling to get the game to acknowledge that yes, I clicked on the door, while being chased by scissorman.
Because jumpy combat and awkward controls don't make me feel scared... they make me *frustrated*. If I'm frustrated, then I'm not scared.
Here's what makes a horror game scary: When you have a chance to breathe in the atmosphere. The atmosphere is what makes a LOT of games eerie or not. You know what game is actually pretty jarring and eerie ot play? Magic School Bus explores the Human Body. Sure you may not be devoured by monsters, yet the odd noise, weird visuals, and the bizarre 90s-silly humour makes the atmosphere very eerie. Atmosphere is way more important in a horror game.
@Josiah Sepulveda Uh, yes?
mmmnn ... I feel like enjoying not being challenged either during your down-time also deserves some love. but first understanding the concepts here might still help? even if not though you did a great job here.
Great video! I recently got Dead Cells, and its a lot of fun. My brain started to tingle I heard Dead Cells music.
Hey Adam, at first: great video-essays you‘re doing there, I‘ve been following your channel for quite some time now and truely enjoy your well-researched, logically and to the point executed content! Keep it up!
I got a question: in one of your videos you mentioned a Website, like a streaming service, for documentaries. But i just can‘t find it again. Can you, or maybe someone in the community, help me to find that again? (:
Curiosity Stream? Maybe?
Bastion/Transistor has the best difficulty setting i have seen so far. It lets players unlock many small difficulty modifiers and activate them on the fly in exchange for extra xp. If something is too hard, you can just deactivate them and pass on the xp boost, but skilled players will still want it, even if the difficulty increase is much higher than the xp gain
You're definitely unto something there. Good vid.
the great thing is that whoever you are there is always a game that fits you, because there are so many genres and so many challenge types/difficulties
What XCOM 2 mods were you using? I don't think I've seen them before.
~Hi! I have a theory for a way to implement challenge well, but I need assistance. I based my theory on two things:
#1. One really good way to increase challenge is with speed. The faster a game is, it is harder to react, perform inputs, and analyze a situation. It also generally makes a game funner, as it greatly improves movement, which can be a pretty good incentive. (A good example of this is Sonic)
#2. The best way to make a challenge is for the player to do it to themselves. Although a game can internally keep the challenge level constant, it has to be subtle, which can be very difficult. However, if a game is designed such that a player consistently challenges themselves, this is ideal because players cannot blame the game’s design if they made the decision to be risky. (A good example is Minecraft)
~So in all, a perfectly challenging game is one where a player decides to go fast. The tricky part is motivating the player to make this decision. Usually, a timer of sorts does not work, as that is a restriction that comes from the game. The same is true for improved scores and enemy loot - the motivation has to come from the player.
~I would say the best way I have seen commonly used to accomplish this balance is the ‘shadow’, which copies a player’s moves, but lags a few seconds behind them. It is just as safe to go slow as it is to go fast, but going fast just feels safer. However, this mechanic would likely get boring if used for an entire game. The only other solution I can see is my personal theory - a game’s story. I think that by rewarding a fast player with more lore and character development, people will naturally challenge themselves to go faster. However, I really don’t know how to do this well without it becoming a linear tradeoff that comes from the game’s design, as well as obvious continuity issues.
~I really want to conceptualize a game that does this, but I really really need help. Please leave any suggestions on what you think is best, or tell me if you think my theory could be improved. I greatly appreciate any feedback!
Hey you left a great comment.
The only idea I have so far that I consider good is to add in optional challenges. A gladiator arena for example
However someone left a great comment higher up. The difficulty in Super Mario World and other Mario games isn't variable, it is static. BUT, there is a skill ceiling and a skill requirement. The skill requirement is simply following the obvious path with coins designing it. The skill ceiling, however, is any other different path or tricks you can use that are harder or much harder, but more fun to do for experienced players. So the game doesn't change with your skill level, instead what changes is how you play.
With the current developments in the field of AI and machine learning, dynamic difficulty will continue to become more personal to each player and hopefully more common. A player can choose their desired challenge level (how forgiving the game is whenever a player makes a mistake) and the game itself can change the difficulty by adjusting the mechanical and tactical requirements of the player.
This was a rather good discussion on a subject I have a lot of feelings about, as someone who works in the industry (albeit not as a designer) and has friends with very varied levels of experience with games. I really dislike how so many players, including people who otherwise write thoughtfully about games, are unable to recognize how the challenge they experience from a game can't be simply boiled down to the game being universally too easy or too hard. It makes discussions about potential difficulty levels or accessibility features (see Dark Souls) really frustrating to read.
Personally, as someone with roughly 400 hours across multiple Monster Hunter titles (which I realize is small compared to series veterans), I didn't really find the relative lack of challenge I found in the early hours of Monster Hunter World to be much of a problem. This was in part because the mere experience of traversing the world now felt delightful and smooth, and because the game made it really easy for me to pick up and try new weapons to learn as I was progressing through the story. Besides, the low ranks of MH4U and Generations really weren't that challenging either once I was familiar with Monster Hunter.
I'd like to say, though, that the name of your channel put me off from checking out your videos for a while... it sounded just a tad too pretentious for me, which is a shame because you don't come across that way in the video and I rather like your style. Just thought I'd share in case you find the feedback useful.
Dificulty is basically "how much concebtrated effort needs to be invested to achieve a given goal".
Just looking at this it is immedietly obvious that based on individual dedication and talent the same system will present different levels of difficulty to different people, and that is not even taking into account what said player wants.
So I see the endevour to cater to anyone automatically as futile and even damaging in the long run.
So I prefer if the game juat lets you fine tune its numbers
Great vid
Adam Millard - answering questions we didn’t know we had
Comparing Monster Hunter World to the older titles (specifically Generations Ultimate) the difficulty has been balanced by making gameplay and combat more fluid and less punishing. They also added a larger arsenal of options in combat to make you as the hunter more powerful, rather than being restricted to the same few moves for each weapon. However, the game still doesnt hold your hand a whole lot, and a few of my friends felt sort of overwhelmed and not sure what to do next at some points.
So pleased to see my boi mini metro
At 11:00, I wish you would have mentioned "Sin Episodes: Emergence". That game had a very interesting "solution" to customizing difficulty for players. Even if you do not like the idea, you can **learn** ALOT from playing around and messing with the settings. It really does make the game very dynamic. And just because they didn't "tune it in" perfectly doesn't mean there isn't some genius to it.
In the options, you can set your initial "difficulty" and then set how much and how quickly you want the "dynamic difficulty" to engage. Giant Bomb wrote up some details:
"The difficulty level works by altering the accuracy and number of enemies and their equipment - the most notable change occurs if you score a number of headshots in a row, as the next group of enemies you face will be wearing helmets. The player can alter the speed at which the system responds if they'd prefer a more gradual increase in difficulty if they're playing well, although the reverse is also true when dying repeatedly and having the game ease off on you."
They forgot to mention that enemies with start, or stop, throwing grenades and using special weapons against you if the difficulty alters enough, instead of just missing more and doing less damage. Replaying levels felt very different each time you change the settings.
Around the 5 minute mark this video starts talking about it: ruclips.net/video/lfNEoz6xZFo/видео.html
I always play games on normal, because the hard or easy modes are often just taking more or less damage etc. which i think tips the balance of the game either for or against the player. I really like that in Doom 2016, the demons get more aggressive (at least I am pretty sure they do) in the harder modes which changes the experience significantly and makes the challenge not just "you take tons of damage".
I fucking hate it when devs lock more complex ai behaviour behind difficulty settings.
Trust me , your AI will still be braindead compared to a human, even on the best settings you can program, so just lock it there.
In Doom's case I didn't mean the AI was smarter, they were just more aggressive and attacked me more frequently. I agree that developers shouldn't lock complex AI behaviour behind a difficulty setting, but in this case I meant that for example the Imps run towards you to perform melee attacks more often. I would'nt say that this is more complex behaviour but merely different behaviour to the normal difficulty setting.
+Benedikt Köhn In that case I digress. I have too many memories of RTs games where the AI sots around doi g bothing unless yoz crank the difdiculty up, which also usually lets it cheat, which I personally prefer to avoid.
I also hate how different difficulty levels can impact some sections/bosses much more than others. An example I can think of:Metroid prime 3. The hardmode makes most of the game more tedious but not actually that much harder, just a little. And then there's the final boss, which goes from hilariously easy to ridiculously hard. It just feels so awkward.
Hunt Showdown is my perfect example of how you can enjoy a difficult game. The basics are easy to learn, but the way it revolves around certain situations makes it challenging and very difficult to master. It forces you to make hard decisions that can either reward you or kill you.
RIMWORLD!!
Tynan is like a programmer-philosopher I never knew I needed that game until I played it.
System Shock, both the original and the remake, used a flexible difficulty setting that allowed you to tweak four different aspects of the game (4 levels in the original, 3 in remake):
Story: 1 gives waypoints and you cannot drop mission-critical items, 2 disables waypoints and you need to determine when a mission item can be dropped, and 3 adds a time limit of 5 hours.
Cyber: 1 makes these hacking mini games easy, 2 ups the difficulty, and 3 adds the penalty of death on failure.
Combat: Affects enemy health, damage, and respawn rate.
Puzzle: affects complexity of puzzles.
While players still won’t know what settings are right for them until they play, this flexible difficulty does allow greater accessibility and agency, especially if a player enjoys one aspect of the game but not another.
3:27 Woah twilight forest, awesome
I like your optimism
Alright, you are simply plain wrong about Monster Hunter World.
Not about it being less of a challenge for you but the reason you are giving is incorrect. Damage values have not changed, telegraphing times are the same, your dodges still have the same ammount of i-frames. All numerical values are exactly the same and *no* your weapons are not "more powerful". The Great Jagras is very easy but in Freedom Unite the Giadrome died just as fast as that fellow, it simply dealt a bit more damage. So aside from the very first monster where only it's damage was scaled down, there are no numerical differences.
The reason as to why Monster Hunter World *feels* easier is because if you are used to fighting high-rank or g-rank monsters your knowledge carries over and those low-rank fights become incredibly easy. Try doing a low-rank quest with low-rank gear in 4U or Generations with your character and you'll notice that it's just as easy as low-rank in World.
I've been with this series for over a decade and when Tri came out I too thought "Huh, this is easy". Then I got to high-rank and it became an appropriate challenge again. Then the exact same thing in 4U and Generations. Easy low-rank, challenging high-rank/g-rank. If that same pattern repeats over and over then it's probably not because the games are getting "easier and easier", especially if they later on whop your ass.
It's because low-rank is designed to be an appropriate challenge for new players and as a veteran you simply have too much experience to find that difficulty challenging.
Within the same game the challenge can and should increase over time but monster hunter is a series that riterates the same difficulty progression meaning once you have gone through this progression, starting at the beginning again in the next title will feel very easy.
That is why some people say the series is getting "easier and easier" when actually they are simply getting better at the game and their desired difficulty for the game would do nothing but scare away newcomers and thus would be a terrible design decision.
Huh, didn't know they didn't make any numerical changes at all, that's pretty interesting.
Although I would argue that the weapons did get more powerful. Not with stat modifications, but with the addition of new moves. As a charge blader, the slide roundslash, charged sword, and slope jump attacks have been very useful in fights. The sword charge slam attack not quite as much, but I've gotten a few good KOs and tail cuts with it. Not to mention the ultra charge burning 5 fewer phials with every use. It's pretty spammable now, as long as you can keep up your dps.
Having started with 4U, the game felt very challenging basically the whole way through. As soon as things started getting easy, I would get to the next rank and my rear would be handed to me once again. The new monsters in each new rank always gave me new patterns to learn as well as forced me to become better with my weapons (learning each one is plenty of fun in its own right).
Tigersight
There are new special moves but most of them take either preparation or have a long animation time and thus leave you exposed.
Also I am fairly certain that the monsters HP were increased a little bit in response to those special moves as there are situations where any player can utilise them - like K.Os, paralysis etc. - and pull of these high damage moves without any danger of being interrupted.
If you look up speedkills in Monster Hunter Freedom Unite for elder dragons they are often at 3-5 minutes and in World Nergigante speedkills usually take around 3 minutes as well. Those 5 minute long speedkills in Freedom Unite are also solo on G-rank monsters, which is an online exclusive difficulty and thus the monsters are scaled for multiple people.
So looking up speedkills shows quite nicely that with an optimal build and playstyle the fights take roughly just as long as in previous games even though we do have new moves. It's quite impressive actually how similar the times are.
TL;DR: The game is easier now because the controls aren't complete shit this time around.
Menus still are though...
I agree, this guy calls himself a 'veteran' but skimps out on end game stuff saying low-rank is too 'easy'. It was always this easy, he just got used to it's difficulty.
His random bs about MHW is so stupid.
I do just want to say that playing Monster Hunter World with a weapon type I wasn't familiar with added an extra challenge for me. It wasn't so much the difficulty of the enemies themselves, but how well I used the weapon that made the difference. I realize this doesn't take away a single aspect of your point, but I just thought it was something to keep in mind. Veterans are subtly encouraged to switch their weapons and try something new with each playthrough because personal weapon mastery isn't recorded between the games or save files.
So, you may be a Longword master in Monster Hunter 4, but playing through World with GreatSword forces you to hard reset your experience to lv1 while starting you off on monsters you can grind against until you get the hang of how the weapon works.
and then you hit High Rank and have to take on tougher challenges that force you to rethink your playstyle... again.
What was that eagle game when it grabs the hare in that short clip?
meanwhile i can't stand it when someone dies in RimWorld (or any other colony game) so i just reload my save when it happens, or enter dev mode and revive them.
When I was a kid, games were a *QUEST.* Unironically, when I was a kid beating a game felt like a test of my dedication, patience, skill, and character; and every new level I unlocked was mysterious, hallowed, and scary.
Nowadays, games feel like an easy, but tedious chore, and I genuinely believe that my 10yrold self would agree. *True difficulty, that is indifferent to the player’s actions, is the best way to disguise mundanity.*
In my experience, the Supergiant games are some excellent examples of allowing players to modulate their difficulty to fit their preferences. Their games all feature some sort of mechanic that makes the game harder to beat in return for more exp. the player has a lot of options for how they want to modulate that difficulty allowing players a more personalized experience. Good video!
I disagree. The fact that its diahetic and not isolated from the game world makes it feel mandatory.
But I do have OCD, so there is that.
That moment you’re hearing Dead Cells music in the background but it hasn’t been brought up as an example so you’re just sitting there waiting for it to hopefully happen because of how fitting an example it would be
*THERE’S* the mention
This video actually inadvertently informed me of how Helium makes things high pitch.
good job
Oh the last part where you mention using only low level gear. I love putting self imposed rules and challenges on the games I play, just to mix it up. I once did a Skyrim run as a bow build but limited my quiver to 24 arrows which forced me to scavenge or even resort to melee. It was pretty fun. Or in stealth games just restarting a section if I get spotted at all.
Very good, sir :)
Your comments on Monster Hunter Worlds new player vs experienced player difficulty was interesting. As a new player to Monster Hunter I felt that the curve quite nice but going back and fighting the easier monster now they feel extremely easy so I could understand an expert having issues with how easy it is to start.
Good video
Can't wait till you hit 100k, you deserve a bunch more your content has great production quality and actually has content vs a lot of bs gaming outlet with the whole shitblog/magazine article bs
Edit: you should have played hollow knight, it was relavent to the topic and not as cliché as darksouls(which I see you mostly Avoided :p)
A system like kid icarus uprising had would be nice to see a little more - the ablity to up or lessen the level difficulty was really good, though still could be refined much further.
You have good taste in games
I remember when I made my first ever public game - which was created for a 48h gamejam.
The game was basically just there to tell a story but there was one small jump n run part which in most players eyes was so hard they couldn't get past it.
This was super confusing to me, because for me the jump n run was easy and I could do it 100% of the time without any issues.
So in this case, I would've classified the game as "very easy" or "not challenging at all" (also because it wasn't supposed to be) but others classified it as "too hard" and "undoable".
This does not just teach something about perspective on difficiulty, but also about having your damn game tested by others before publishing it.
Have you ever played the Myst games? It was your mention of walking simulators that made me think of them, though they're more puzzle games than walking games. They're still really good, and Riven, Exile and Revelation (2, 3 and 4 in the series) still hold up really well graphically and narratively (that said, Riven may be a challenge to get to run on a technical level - it is now a VERY old game.)
Personally I would avoid Myst V and Uru, for a couple of reasons: firstly because they deviate way too far from the personal nature of the other Myst games, and secondly because they decided to make 3d models of the environments rather than doing the usual Myst thing of pre-generated stills and walking nodes. The graphics of these games have not aged well, and many of the puzzles are turned into a hunt for the obscurely hidden MacGuffin that you need to progress rather than an actual puzzle to solve. (Uru is particularly problematic for this.)
Myst is probably best experienced in the form of realMyst: Masterpiece edition. From there, Riven, Myst 3: Exile, and Myst 4: Revelation are still the only versions of their games as far as I know. (There's the Starry Expanse Project that's trying to remake Riven in an entirely faithful, 3D environment that looks every bit as good as the old pre-rendered stills, but that's still very much a work in progress.)
Ultrakill has the best way of making a difficult challenge the most fun thing ever. Most games, for example DOOM eternal, reload an area upon death. You try, die, and wait for a load time, then try again. Mind you these games have a ton of great detail and fidelity that require reloading. In ultrakill’s case however, when you die, you IMMEDIATELY get back to the last checkpoint (unless you’re doing P ranks) this is done by not reloading the level, but despawning enemies and respawning them. An immediate re do makes challenging levels more bearable because you don’t have to sit through a 10 second loading screen.
I just realized that the thing I enjoy in hardcore games is not the DIFFICULTY, but the CHALLENGE
a very intresting example i think of scaling difficulity is salt and sanctuary, a soulsvania.
it is a pretty punishing game, like dark souls, and the majority of players will often die, the game will remain static in that regard except that leveling your character will make it stronger.
however if you dont die, ever, at some point the game recognizes that you are too good for the game and it will drastically increase the responsiveness and agressiveness of enemies, making it much harder and it looks noticbly different but very subtly.
but i cant remember where i saw this, i found it interesting because most people dont know about it since it is rare to stomp the game without dying, it is like an easter egg that feels very thematic.
Feel you on MHW. I absolutely love it, and it's my favorite in the series... now that I've progressed far enough for it to actually be difficult.
I think they should have given us the option to ramp up the difficulty in the campaign, maybe giving us access to higher tiered stuff sooner.
Apple Cider That’s what G rank is for though, high rank is just the warm up.
Did I just seen twilight forest boss? Damn it was so long since I played this mod.
Aaand he was using a Thaumcraft 6 weapon.
Difficulty is like balance. We think that it's a slider you have to have in a specific place or your game is broken, but it's actually a tool that you can use in a variety of ways, and no matter where you put the slider your game will feel broken if you didn't think before you put it there.
It's all about the state you try to evoke in your players. There's nuance, but for the most part the proper state of almost every game involves the player feeling that they can improve their results by improving their play. Where controlling difficulty comes in is that to maintain that state you need to ensure that there are breakpoints and gradients where better play gets better results available to your players as much of the time as possible. The much bigger thing is to have a robust system to offer degrees of success gated by degrees of applied skill.
FTL is a great example of this. In any given fight, the minimum degree of success is very low, warping out of the fight with at least one hull point remaining and at least one crew member alive. However, you very rarely are willing to settle for mere survival when there will be more fights and the difficulty is always ramping up. At the very least you'll usually be trying to win the fight so you can loot the other ship and minimize hull damage and crew deaths. Even if you gain enough of an edge to mostly avoid damage it becomes very hard to be completely certain that you're completely safe. The result is that you can go from being very bad to being very good at FTL without ever losing the sense that you will be rewarded for improving.
Woohoo new upload
quite an interessting watch
What's that minecraft mod at 3.28?
I'm a big fan of how Rimworld offers the player the choice of how to deal with challenges and difficulty in different ways.
Putting the tools in the players hands and offering a default few choices for beginners is a great way to balance the needs of pros and newbies alike.
Difficulty that modulates based on player performance is kinda odd, the harder the player works the harder the game gets the less the player works the less the player has to work. It's a weird feedback loop that doesn't seem to reward players who fight harder and doesn't punish players for slacking.
But it's good in broad strokes, in terms of altering the numbers of challenges the player faces without altering the difficulty setting itself.
As you say in Rimworld you get different events based on the number of colonists you have and to a certain extent it's good that you get that modular variation in challenges because you want the player to work for their playthrough. But once the player figures this out they game the game.
You end up making some kind of strong defensive network or you become more of a ruthless torturer to prisoners and give them all peg legs in case of escape, even though the game is kind of rewarding this behaviour. It makes sense to neuter prisoners you take in if you're going to release them even though realistically this wouldn't be optimal.
You end up harvesting prisoner organs after each wedding or party because the mood bonus is huge from those, and you end up gaming the weird karma system the game has.
Curiously the organs are priced at fairly high values in order to deter this kind of behaviour because it's a good way to "cheat" in extra money.
However this means if you need human organs for a transplant you're going to spend a fortune with a trader for it otherwise, so this ends up hurting the normal course of gameplay.
There's a lot of issues with modular difficulty that are very subtle and having something based on a really undefined set of values/time played/no of colonists just ends up changing how the player would normally play.
Don't get me started on the stupid mood debuffs like everyone irrationally hating a person with a broken nose or facial disfigurement.
Or how all the colonists seem to go nuts over seeing one dead body after like 20 raids they'll still behave as if they were newbies.
Or if you end up with a colonist who is bedbound due to a brain injury you're better off letting them die to a raid than nurse them until you can get hold of a special repair serum. I just dev mode fix those after a few dice rolls, some things just don't translate well into game experiences.
And if you go the reverse route and just try not to alter your play to all of this weird stuff and just take on any old colonist who comes knocking you just end up with more busywork and micro thanks to that one stupid "inability to do manual chores" thing that half of the rimworld seems to have.
There's lots of workarounds to this stupid trait but the main dev seems determined to force players to work with this weird trait no matter what and keeps editing the workarounds out.
It's maddening, it's so close to be a really really great game but it just falls short due to how it's difficulty scales in weird ways and how it focuses so heavily on the colonist mood to push the player to accommodate their needs.
You end up becoming some kind of hotel manager more than a survival expert. It's bizarre.
FINALLY someone mentions that people tend to get different things out of experiences. Most recently I saw people talk about how Final Fantasy 4's remakes for DS, PC, and PSP were hard. I spat out my water.
HARD?! Those games?! I got the DS version. Unless I somehow unlocked a hidden "Easy" setting that still hasn't been discovered 10 years later, that game was an utter cakewalk to me. I only had ONE game over - ONE. Even when Golbez would start the fight with people KO'd, I didn't lose or even finish the fight with anyone down - because I quickly had everyone back up and running in seconds. Even Zeromus, I beat on my first try with nobody dead at the end. And I didn't even break the game with augments such as dualcast - things people claim you HAVE to do in the game, and I didn't stop to grind. Apparently, I was the only one who thought to use Haste and Slow.
I also remember people saying that Pokémon is too easy - I never had a problem beating Pokémon games that coudlnt' be explained by "I was a kid who didn't pay attention or even know what some items did." But then someone mentioned that they wanted to make level 40 challenging again. And when I asked which game this was, they said... get ready for it... Pokémon Gold, Silver, and Crystal.
I spat my water out. Those games are EASY. Get a Totodile. Teach it ice punch. Then laugh as you just power everything.
There are two parts to challenge or difficulty - how much you know about the game, and the design.
A lot of older games are "Tough" either because of poor design, players not knowing about the game (Because they weren't explained at all or explained poorly.... or only explained in a manual that you lost ages ago/never even had because you bought it used) or both. Some things are just poorly designed which makes it more difficult for a variety of reasons.
A lot of older games are difficult because they don't tell you what you need to know, hence why you go with your intuition and just brute force things. This is a main reason as to why Pokémon is "getting easier" that nobody is looking at - when you were a kid playing Red and Blue, you didn't know what all the stuff meant. Now you do. Ergo it's a LOT easier because you know what to expect.
Monster Hunter World is also a lot easier because it gives your more ways to figure out key mechanics that MH didn't explain to you before. I loved hearing MH vets sneer at me for not knowing how to avoid the beam of death from Dalamadur. They told me to do the "superman dive". I asked "What is that?" and their response was "Superman dive". WHAT IS THE FREAKING SUPERMAN DIVE DAMMIT?! Then they told me that I didn't have to be on the ground... I needed to go THROUGH the beam of death. I-sorry, I-what?! I'm supposed to run TOWARDS the beam of death and dive INTO it and time it so that I go INTO it? I can't jump to a lower platform? That makes NO FREAKING SENSE!!!
Good design rewards intuition. A lot more challenges these days are making things more intuitive. Let's say final Fantasy IV again... Zeromus does the whole 'Big Bang' attack that deals massive damage. that's a fair attack, because he literally WARNS you about it. You can easily figure out that Zeromus will use big Bang because he shakes before. If I don't learn it, that's me being stupid. But if it's like Yunalesca in final Fantasy X who requires you to have to have Zombie on your party (something you have to AVOID), then I'm going to get frustrated.