Old Video Games

Miscellaneous Topics
#21

What is wrong with difficulty levels existing at all is that it implies that the game is trying to beat you, not the other way around.

There are basically two classifications of games - those where you play against people, and those where you play against “the game”. An example of each would be chess, and patience.

Games where you play against others are almost trivial to set difficulty - you play against people of similar skill, or you randomly allot the chances of winning from game to game and thus difficulty is irrelevant.

Games where you play against “the game” are much more awkward to explain because of the incredibly long lasting legacy of the 70s and 80s arcade coin-op mentality and how they’ve affected the current generations of games programmers. Coin-op is very much about trying to “beat” the game for as long as possible before it extracts money from you. They are deliberately tuned to allow you to incrementally get a bit better at it every time you play, and get a bit further. This mentality persists to the modern day with such ridiculous concepts as “save points” which are a total anachronism.

The root of the problem is this: it should be as much fun to “lose” a game as it is to “win”. It should, in effect, simply be fun playing the game. For 99% of all players, hard is not fun. Unfortunately nearly all developers, and especially developers of their own computer game, are in the 1% who get bored with the challenge quite quickly and decide to try and stack the odds against themselves actually completing the game. Then they go and make their game too hard, and so they retrofit a lame difficulty level selector for the 99% of the population for whom it should have been irrelevant.

My tip: every time I made my games easier, they sold more. The easier they are… the more they sold. This is down to one single factor alone: easy games are what people want to play. Easy games are more fun for more people. Don’t waste your time with difficulty selectors that mean nothing to 99% of your customers.

Cas :slight_smile:

#22

I agree and disagree.

First and foremost, one example you use, Chess, is a type of game where difficulty selection is essential. Namely, in order to truly enjoy the game, you need to choose an opponent near your skill level. If the opponent is too easy, the game becomes boring, if the opponent is way more experienced, you get steamrolled.

The most basic fundamental of gameplay (in any context) is challenge the player needs to overcome. And challenges imply difficulty, yet not everyone can handle the same difficulty, while still enjoying the challenge itself (Again, like chess).

Your assessment that easier game sell more is correct (in my opinion), but I think it follows a marketing trend more than anything. That notion of disposable games we mentioned earlier (The reason, I agree, being that there are so many options today you don’t need to stick with something that you don’t like) I think is at play here. Easier games are easier to pick up and beat for a quick fix, but not the type of games you will play over and over.

In today’s market, these “play once and forget” games are financially sound, so I won’t argue that, if your primary objective is selling a product, working to maximize your audience is a must.

But, if you are either trying to fill an specific niche (because there are difficulty junkies out there cough IWTBTG cough), or, like me, just a hobbyist doing it for fun or as a learning experience, it’s ok to do different just for the sake of doing it.

And yes, it should be as much fun to lose as to win, I totally agree. Maybe an interesting option is to adjust difficulty dynamically based on player performance? If they keep dying, subtly lower the difficulty, if they keep pushing forward unopposed, subtly up it to keep them engaged.

#23

WRT to “it should be as much fun to lose as to win” and “being steamrollered at Chess” … if you’re playing competitively against someone vastly better than you whose only objective is to defeat you and make you look like a fool… part of the enjoyment of chess is the understanding, memorising and application of strategies that defeated you and analysis of your own strategies that failed. This is why chess is fun even when you lose. It can be even more fun when someone vastly better than you actually talks you through how they’re defeating you.

Easy does not mean throwaway. It means games you can play for a very long time before the game forces you to stop, usually by simply making it impossible for you to play any longer. Don’t confuse it with throwaway games! Throwaway games are throwaway because they have no depth, or they rely on a consumable set of content, the consumption of which is the chief pleasure in playing. Many AAA titles actually fall into the latter category - they may cost £29.99 but you’ll still only play them once because there’s almost no fun in going back to play through again.

Cas :slight_smile:

#24

What I’m getting at is that there’s a delicate balance between an engaging game and a throwaway game. Not matter how deep the gameplay is, if it is balanced to make it too easy, the player will get bored easily (no challenge).

As for chess, playing against a more skilled opponent is a way to learn, yes, and is part of the enjoyment, but if that opponent is so far above your level you can’t even react to what she is doing (or understand it), then it becomes frustrating (And the expert player teaching you to improve would be a tutorial, a different matter altogether)

Example in videogames: Counter Strike. I liked that game very much, but never managed to enjoy playing online (back on its heyday) because other players were so skilled I could barely take a step before being shot in between the eyes. And all the advice in the world didn’t help either, because since it had a very important reflex-based gameplay, strategy could get you so far before raw training became the deciding factor.

That is the other side of the difficulty coin.

In short: Make a game too easy, the player gets bored; Make it too hard, the player gets frustrated.

Difficulty options are a way to give the player more agency in the balancing of the game, and, for deep and replayable games, I think is something mandatory, as players will gain skill and require more of a challenge to keep engaged.

Then again, as with the Counter-Strike example, it depends a lot on the type of game. Puzzle games depend more on intellectual interaction, and thus can be learned gradually through trial and error. Twitch/Reflex games, on the other hand, require training, and if the early stages of training are beyond the skill of the trainee, there’s little to be done to improve.

#25

I think this is why twitch reflex games are so unpopular today with the world at large.

Cas :slight_smile:

#26

Agreed. And quite possibly why the “hardcore” resent the “casual”. ::slight_smile:

(I so hate those labels)

#27

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I wouldn’t call old video games boring. Plenty of new titles are trying to emulate the experience and feel of older games. I feel overall that the addition of difficulty levels, and not giving the player enough control of the character’s they are playing as really dampen the experience of new video games a lot. In the old video games, I feel that you are able to experiment more with the game. I don’t really like getting achievements for everything, sometimes randomly finding a secret passageway, or discovering a hidden location gives me more joy than getting random achievements.

There is a joy to be found in challenging games. I think Tetris is one of the most challenging games for reflex action around. Games that start off with a simple concept, and then throw in extra little challenges to overcome are usually the best games. Games that lure you into thinking that if you try hard enough, you can win. Those games can keep you hooked for hours.

However, I think what separates the old from the new is complete lack of a simple GUI. Controls and the menu systems have become a lot more complicated. Before, it used to take 1 click to get into the game. Now, you have menus and sub-menus for almost everything. You get used to it overtime, but I wonder how many people play the game for all the features it has to offer. I know I only use about 30% of the total features of the newer games. In the older games, it was more like 70%.

I guess time just makes things more complicated. We want different, we want flashy, we want entertainment. However, when they cater to that, the game play falls short. But, what can I say, flashy graphics sell big bucks. Why should we waste time with an engaging story, tight working controls, or cramming little secrets within our games that people don’t have to look for? Make it pretty, get the bucks. Plain and simple.

#28

But how many players find unchallenging fun? As a general rule, if you can play it without engaging brain or reflexes what’s to stop it from getting boring? The fun is in overcoming the challenge, and the hard thing as a developer is to ensure that the 99% can overcome the challenge before they get frustrated while at the same time giving the 1% a challenge at all. I don’t have a problem with difficulty levels which are used to prevent people who already know the genre and have some of the skills from getting bored.

I love the concept of adaptive difficulty, but I haven’t yet written a game which uses it. What I have done with some of my games is to try to make them multipath. Shift Shift 4k has one (harder than I really wanted, because I didn’t have space and ideas for a longer curve) route where you aim to complete the levels, and one (intentionally very hard) route where you aim to collect the BONUS letters. Torquing! has various hard-to-reach areas which are unnecessary to complete the levels but entirely necessary to collect the hardest achievements. This is an approach which I’m very comfortable with.

#29

There’s your personal problem right there: you’re one of the 1% - you don’t really “get” the 99%. Stop even thinking about the 1% who get bored. They are an irrelevant - yes, irrelevant - minority of your userbase.

Cas :slight_smile:

#30

I don’t think the divide is 1%/99%, regardless of how topical that distribution is nowadays.

And I also think that, as more and more people get into games and it becomes something normal, more of those casual players will develop an specific taste for certain niches, including difficult retro games.

And when I say “think” I actually mean “hope”. Such a fractured market would be harder to profit from, true, but I’d rather have that than a market buried under “mass appeal” products. If only as a player who is tired of being told I should like what everyone else does.

But, right now, if you’re in the business of selling games, it’s more profitable to maximize accessibility.

#31

Not just right now, but forever. People don’t change.

If you’re in the business of satisfying tiny niches then of course go right on ahead and make it as hard as you like of course :slight_smile: But if you’re going to go to all that effort I wonder why not just make it fun for everyone else too.

Cas :slight_smile:

#32

I love Dark Souls.
Enough said about my taste =D

#33

I’m saying that it’s not 1% who get bored. Everyone gets bored. (I also think it’s worth thinking about the 1% too, but that’s a different issue).

#34

Who knows what the exact % is, but hard games simply do not sell. Almost nobody wants to buy them, because they don’t like hard games. For sure there is a niche that does, and thrives on them… but they are incredibly difficult to focus.

Cas :slight_smile:

#35

Ever heard of Super Meat Boy?

#36

Dark Souls sold like 2 million times.
The new version for the consoles will up this.
A game which sells like 2,5 million times definitely tells you its fine to have hard games.
And Dark Souls is not just hard…

Well economical you can just make a game which is easy enough and throw in a special hard mode…

#37

You write the next Dark Souls and then you can feel free to compete with them.

Cas :slight_smile:

#38

Gotta have ambition :smiley:

#39

Actually, they do. Videogames are still somewhat marginal, but as the new generations that have grown with gaming (around a 90% usage as I’ve heard) become older, it will take its place as just another form of media, like movies or music.

And niches then… Well, not everybody likes the same music, do they? And no one would call alternate music styles as “niche”. Well, maybe J-Pop.

Write this off as a fantasy… But movies where in the very same spot some time ago, considered marginal and incapable of being art, and things changed.

#40

Stuff changes… but very very slowly. And the fundamental premise that “people like easy” I don’t think has ever been any different - the problem was that “the people” have been catered for by “the 1%” without much in the way of competition for a long time. That is, the kinds of people who were prone to making video games were necessarily the sorts of people who fit that 1% niche in the first place. This is why all those 80s games are so rubbish when you play them today - you have come to realise just how much better games are when they are not designed by geeky programmers who understand rules and systems and low-level graphics programming but by people who actually try to understand other people and give them what they actually like to play.

I am absolutely as guilty of this as anyone else, and in fact consider myself to be a totally shit game designer, even worse than I am as a programmer. It takes me years to make something trivially simple even acceptable to play by “ordinary” people eg. my 13 yr old nephew or my wife, when some people just bash out “fun stuff” in a few weeks flat and rake in the dough.

It’s all very well to go citing occasional one-off hits like Super Meat Boy or Call of Duty etc. but seriously, these games are exceedingly rare (and their success is as much an artifact of marketing as it is game design). The vast majority of games which are “hard” sink without trace. You should instead be looking more to the casual space to see just how many people were not being catered to by these designs. The incredible success of games like Alchemy, Worms, Bejewelled, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, etc. should be a sobering reminder of why twitch-based shmups and pixel-perfect platformers remain firmly out of the sales charts and most ordinary peoples’ consciousness.

Cas :slight_smile: