The Necessary Cruelty of Hard Games | Static Canvas
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- Опубликовано: 20 окт 2024
- What do Invisible,Inc, Tharsis and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice have in common? Each game is built around a fundamental identity of challenge, exhibiting a specific cruelty to effect a defined experience for the player. In this video, I look at the ways in which each game uses it's difficulty and why they fundamentally do not work without it.
Music is from the respective soundtracks of each game:
Invisible,Inc. composed and arranged by Vince de Vera and Jason Garner
Tharsis, from the Half Age EP by Weval, which can be found here weval.bandcamp...
Sekiro, composed by Yuka Kitamura
Static Canvas is written, recorded and produced by Thomas Ife
I think Genichiro's flurry pattern is like a permanent neuron pathway in my brain at this point
True, but it's very very rare that I see people get the whole thing without missing any. It's the second to last slash that 99 times out of 100 just results in a block instead of a parry
I swear It’s burned into my brain
much more efficient dodging the last hit and attacking anyway
You just made me tap the back of my phone in the rhythm of that attack
I felt myself genuinely improve at Super Smash Brothers after playing and beating Sekiro because I started analyzing my opponents like enemies from Sekiro and it just worked. When you said Sekiro is more like a fighting game…this really clicked for me. Brilliant video and connections you made🎉
I'm hoping that we eventually are able to examine game difficulty more like this, as a component that can contribute to a game's artistic potential and even its realization. As someone who's kind of fallen away from hard games in recent years, it is fascinating to see what these kinds of games have to share through their difficulty, the messages that can be communicated via the player's actions and struggles. It's great to see more stuff like this from you, sir. Always a joy seeing a new video from you in the subscriptions box. 👍
This video is phenomenal! I've recently been making video games myself, and something that comes up a lot in playtests are requests to make a certain part of the game easier or make something more effective. Sometimes the change does need to be made, but a lot of the time, to me, the change they want runs counter to the idea I had in mind.
I can't tell you how many times I've said "But that makes it too easy... It's supposed to challenge you, it's supposed to make you think."
There are certain ways I want a player to tackle a problem that I want them to discover through the mechanics fighting against the easy solution. Humans inherently like solving problems. My job as a developer is not to hand them a solution, but to hide one in plain sight; they just need to put the pieces together and work it out.
Often times, as a developer, I have to ask the player to trust me on this one, and to keep trying to see what I want them to see. Play in the way I know is going to be more fun.
Your videos are great, and I wish more people knew about this channel. You really get the brain thinking!
Can imagine it's a tough balance to make, artistic integrity vs player expectations. Thanks for your kind words!
Truly Sekiro might've ruined some other games for me, even in FromSoft's own catalogue!
I was having a blast in Elden Ring getting my proverbial arse beaten by the Crucible Knights in (most likely) the first Evergaol you will find, it took me so many tries but once I beat him it felt like I know him like the back of my hands, so far all is good. The infamous Tree Sentinel? Great first impression, these days I can beat him in a few tries. But things went awry as I progress, I explore a lot and then gets overleveled in many places where I just stomp everything without effort, I made a lot of mistake _I knew_ I could fix next time but I beaten the bosses anyway and it didn't feel earned; it felt like I didn't play the game at all and just brute forced through it with the leveling system. It really killed the fun for me for a long while until the end game where things starts to get more focused again.
I still really love the game (it's in my top 3 FromSoft game), but almost nothing can top Sekiro now. I really like their games that encourage and rewards aggressive and risky playstyle, Elden Ring's "stance" system is practically a "posture-lite" mechanic and I love it's inclusion, which I miss everytime I play the older games.
Dearly recommend Elden Ring Reforged.
@@poe1554 I wish I'm on PC like how I've played all the other Souls games, but sadly I can't run ER on my now relatively potato spec and only play it on a PS4.
Got worried (jokingly) over the subject of another Dark Souls difficulty video when looking at the thumbnail, but really glad the video also focused on two interesting games I've never heard of. Great video!
Invisible Inc is a perfect video game and more of us should say it.
The thing about it, is that it excels at drawing out your Crisis Brain. The more you lean into the eventual Expert difficulty, the more you embrace playing through errors and not using (or even having) Rewinds, the more likely you are to encounter the scenario the whole game is engineered to produce; when the mission goes completely to hell, where hope is lost, where you _know_ it's game over, and out of habit if nothing else you run the options anyway, and against the will of god himself you find a way to salvage it, to drag your unconscious squad through a crowd of guards to the elevator, _with_ the loot, and know with certainty that you are the greatest tactical genius who ever lived. This is why I decided to stream and upload my expert ironman run, and by god did it deliver. I'll never forget that playthrough as long as I live.
(Into the Breach is also very good at this, except it combines its cruelty with its fairly small game space and mechanical simplicity to encourage you to basically brute force scenarios until you come up with an utterly unhinged gambit in which shelling your own city is what wins you the game. Masterful stuff)
This title alone is phenomenal
I'm very pleased with that bit in particular haha. The rest of the script is ok I guess
Starting the video with the OMNI soundtrack is a solid choice.
The way you've showcased Invisible Inc. and Tharsis reminds me of Lobotomy Corp and Gods Will Be Watching respectively.
In Lobotomy Corp you are also put in a position where you're fighting against a time limit, with the effort of reaching the finale being relatively straightforward but standing no chance in overcoming the final ordeal if you don't maximize the time up to that point strengthening your employees. In fact, it's practically impossible for you to beat the game on the first run due to how the odds are canonically stacked up against you. Instead, you need to accumulate bonuses from "optional" challenges that persist through resets to grow even stronger within this time span. The game is steeped in traumatic and emotional themes and the pressure you feel- from losing employees on a day-to-day basis to culling them as a whole for a stronger time loop- feeds perfectly into the dark fantasy ludonarrative.
Gods Will Be Watching is also another game with a simple premise that plays up front with RNG, with win percentages rather than dice rolls. It doesn't have as many layered systems like Tharsis, but it does a lot for weighing your morality against games of chance. The game is beautifully animated and written and it does a great job in investing the player's emotions in a bunch of pixels on screen despite being a more or less numbers game at the end of it all.
When difficulty in games is brought up it is often tainted with discussions of elitist shaming and game accessibility, but I think there it's worth recognizing that difficulty can be more than gameplay padding and there are games that do a masterful work of weaving the difficulty as part of the game experience. Yes, you have the freedom to play games however you want by modifying and cheating away challenges, but players don't always know what they want, and finding the games that have strong payoffs for difficulty can absolutely be diamonds in the rough worth digging for.
Someone linked this on the Invisible Inc fan discord server, and I am delighted by the contrast between the title and the fact that the Invisible Inc footage is shot on Beginner.
(also, I may be on the wrong side of history on this one, but "begs the question" is supposed to mean "avoids the question", not "raises the question".)
I do enjoy the musicality of the phrase "masters of the bastard arts", though. It works better in your accent than mine >.>
I'd never thought about it before but 'Begs the question' is one of those etymologically weird phrases that's meaning has warped over time, you're absolutely right though I am technically using it wrong haha. Thanks for your comments, lots to think about!
Properly balanced difficulty creates excitement. Penalties create stakes. That risk creates reward.
Funny you mention fighting games when talking about FromSoft because when I played my first Souls game, DSIII I both used fighting game terminology to describe the game, especially the bosses and also saw my approach be somewhat familiar with the bosses, I’d usually just take the first minute or two of a boss to see what their attacks are because I focus on actually hitting them in the same vain I would normally playing an unfamiliar player etc…, even if it looks completely different.
Hard games are inteligence trial. In order to grow, you need to be put in place you don't have control.
"sometimes the problem is just me" - HARD relate. I often find it difficult to consider a game bad usually because it's not the fault of the game, it's just me!
30:30, really? 😅 I really need to play Sekiro urgently.
Its quite a nice thing when developer actually incorporate difficulty in the creation of the game, that helps later on with balancing the game, difficulty sliders or choice are almost never well implemented in modern games and they feel like they have just increased a set of numbers up.
Invisible INC definitely feels like something I would choose over XCOM 2, I know KLEI for the art style and the capacity to create intricate systems.
What I like about Invisible,inc is that it does the XCom thing but in a 5 hour campaign rather than a 20-80 hour one. Its incredibly concise
@@Buliaros18-Static-Canvas Glad to hear that ... because, in this day and age I have little patience to play endless games. I rather master challenges, than to stall hours in the same grind for the sake of finishing a game.
The one cruel thing about sekiro is having to fight the chained ogre, the blazing bull, and any juzou type on every single playthrough. Some of the least fun bosses in gaming and not in a hard way
Sekiro isnt hard,it relies on a issue to appear being hard
input queue,and not being able to cancel attacks mid swing.
literally i installed one mod to cancel attacks mid swing like i was able to do in ds2 and the game difficulty was cut in half.
So there's this fun little game called Pathologic 2. Have you tried it? ;)
Funnily enough this video was going to include the Pathologic games and the theatre of cruelty but I cut the segment because I haven't played enough of them to really do it justice. Maybe in the future?
Looking forward to it!
it's also hard not to know what to play
Is Sekiro really the hardest game out there currently?
No, not even close. If you have never parried its really really hard on your first playthrough, FIRST PLAYTHROUGH. thts the hardest part of the game. Ones you know the rhythm. Its one of the easiest games to no hit bosses in
@itsame7491 that's what I thought too. It's basically just parrying and figuring out the boss' rhythm.
Try any ninja gaiden game on master ninja difficulty. Hard enough to not feel easy after getting used to it unlike sekiro, and the enemies are absolutely not braindead not even on Normal
Edit: Ninja Gaiden Black/Sigma on Hard is the equivalent of Sekiro in terms of difficulty. Very Hard and Master Ninja exist
@adamnasser9120 I will try those. Thanks! Any of them on ps5?
@@kevinburke1325 absolutely. There's the master collection i remember it's around $30-35 for all 3 games