Is it okay for games to be unforgivably difficult, or should players be allowed to play however they want?

I still reckon alongside a content rating, quality control and disclaimers a full suite of cheat effects should be a mandatory publishing requirement of all games. One of my all-time favourite games is Demon's Souls. I adored the obscure challenge. I still play it occasionally just for that aspect.

But I would LOVE to be an overpowered monster in that world. Disable or have an alternate suite of achievements, disable or limit online play, whatever you have to do to make it work should be done. Giving the player more of those customizable gameplay options will never make a good game a poorer product.

Both answers are reasonable. There's nothing wrong with having a very tough game that can be modded to be easier.

Both answers are fine.

Within reason I suppose. At some point difficulty is detrimental to the enjoyment of the game and that point comes sooner for some than others.

My opinion is that both are true. A dev is completely entitled to design the game how they envision it. Saw somebody on steam argue that they should be allowed the play the game (banner saga) how they like, saving before making critical decisions, and they don't care how it was designed; They like it that way, they should play it that way. This was seen as a knock against the dev, for not allowing him to play how he likes. HOWEVER, I think that the dev should design the game exactly how they believe, and players should be able to do whatever they like within that space.

A game that doesn't design around a player is no worse for it, but once the game is in the wild, any way to play it is acceptable. Whether it's speedrunners exploiting glitches, or pro smash players.

Just my thoughts

I'm going to play games in a way that is fun to me. I couldn't care less what anyone else thinks, including people who made the game who may see it another way.

If the difficulty is such that a big portion of the playerbase will be unable to see the content of the game, then maybe have an easier difficulty setting. Otherwise, design it to make it the best game possible.

That doesn't mean super hard games can't exist. Super Meat Boy's whole point is being super difficult. It would be silly to have an easy mode for that.

A developer should make a game how they want to make it, and someone playing a game should play it however they want to play it.

Seriously not seeing why both can't be an option. Games should allow punishing harder modes for challenge-oriented players, and give easier ones to the more casual. Games like SMB and Dark/Demon Souls are a different story, obviously. The whole allure there is the high level of difficulty. I'm talking more about gaming in general, not niche gaming.

Yes or both

It's nice to have an option to make a game as unforgiving or forgiving as you like it. That said, developers should make what they want and players should just know what they're getting into before hand and decide accordingly.

This!

Guys guys guys

The Player's opinion is both.

The Developer's opinion is NOT both.

The Ironman option is a good example of this=

If you side with the "Player", the Player would add an optional "No Permadeath" option.

If you side with the "Developer", there wouldn't be that option, because the best way to play it is with permadeath on. If you turned permadeath off, he'd say you'd be missing out! Crucial point: The developer also believes that players that select an easier setting would actually have less fun than if they selected the optimum difficulty. That's huge. He's basically saying that he knows how you should be having fun better than you do... or at least he thinks so for the majority of the players.

Thank god for the modding community - though I don't play with it as much as others. For games with a decent one, you can have it both ways.

That said, as a person who has on many occasions gotten, say, 20-30 hours into a game and then decided that the difficulty was no longer fun and either turned it down to easy or turned on cheats, I generally stand on the player's side of the equation. Give us more choice, not less, when it comes to our games and how we can play them.

I play games as the developers intended, or at least how they shipped it, and judge it on those merits. If I have to mod a game to change the experience, it isn't really "the game" anymore. Nothing wrong with modding, but a game becoming "playable" or "good" based on specific modifications, doesn't make it legitimately good. Games should be scored and critiqued based on the shipped product; a good game needs to be able to stand on its own.

It's the devs decision. They make the game, they get to decide. They also know that too high difficulty, or indeed to low, will put some people off it. But it's their choice.

@mb: No man, like, if you aren't playing on hard, like, what are you even doing with your life mannn..

if the game is way to hard and you dont like it. dont fucking buy it. simple as that.
i dont have a problem with a fps having easy mode if people want to play it like that then sure go ahead there is nothing wrong with it. but if they put a easy mode in dark souls, that defeating the point of the game.

i think games that go down the road of convenience for the player can sometimes end up being more frustrating. after getting everything your own way, when you're denied something little, for no real reason, it can feel super annoying.

i'm playing through Resident Evil and Far Cry 4 at the moment, and I'd say RE is the fairer game. If i have to repeat twenty minutes of play in RE it comes down a decision i made about whether to save or not, and that i can deal with. But in Far Cry the auto-save is not perfect, and fucks me over sometimes, and sometimes a mission cuts off because i strayed too far trying to kill a dude, and i get reset, thirty or forty yards away or whatever, which seems pointless and disruptive and counter-intuitive.

Then again, it depends on the game and the situation. The way Bioware handles it's romances might be a good example. It sets up these characters to have wills of their own, and the player can be denied their chosen partner because of... what exactly? the integrity of the gameworld? heartbreak becomes a possible outcome for the player's character. is that worth the effort? does anyone appreciate it? would it be better to have all characters romancable by the player nomatter what? in Bioware's case I think the integrity of the gameworld falls far short of where it needs to be to overrule that.

Devs should look into player ideas, as sometimes they can miss something or not realize how something will be approached by people who didn't make the game, but challenge is enjoyable. To make everything easy is style, not mandatory.

Now I kinda want an ironman/hardcore mode for Dear Esther, and a story mode for Super Meatboy.

A game should be as the developer intended it to be, but still offer different ways to play the game.

As long as I have a chance to change the difficulty, I don't care if they put super sexual sadist mode in. If that's all that's in there, they just won't be getting my money is all.

The devs should make the game they want to make, if I don't like a design decision in a game will I mod it or use a hex editor to circumvent that aspect .

Happy enough if I have control over the difficulty, though I almost never have to lower it. I only think it's ridiculous when a game is hard to the point where it just feels cheap and the A.I. is getting one over on the player, recently one of the DLC's on Metro Redux felt like that. There was a section where you had to take out some kind of rail car that was shooting rockets but no matter where you went for cover they would always find you. After about 40mins of constant restarts and the patience of a saint I finally got it, but the game almost went out the window.

Developers can make any game they want, and players can, usually, mod a game however they want. Everyone wins except the people who absolutely must find something to whine about.

A game should be as developers intended, but that means they have a responsibility to make the difficulty hard but reasonable. There should playtest the game a lot to avoid weird spikes in difficulty and unbeatable configurations. Many developers create difficulty based on random generation and multipliers, and then complain about "people not playing as designed". Games with random components are good, but they need to make sure the randomness doesn't lead in unbeatable levels.

That being said, I have no problem if someone decides to circumvent an element of the game if they feel it stack the difficulty against him. I have done it occasionally... Developers should consider that, for many people, that is preferable than not playing more than a few minutes of the game (or nothing at all).

Games should not be unfair assholes in design. Deaths should be the fault of the player, for lacking knowledge, experience or making a mistake. Not by encounter or map-design being the terriworst.

Souls games and Bloodborne are fair on the player (sat out on DS2) and the difficulty is in learning, adapting, mastering, but definitely not forgiveable god bless them for that. Could be argued that O&S, Demon FireSage, LavaDude etc are asshole boss encounters though.

Hey, don't forget the maneaters - that encounter is almost purely based on luck, hoping that the first one stays around long enough each time it lands to kill it so you don't have to fight two at a time.

Otherwise I agree that the Souls games are generally pretty fair in terms of difficulty.

As others have said, the developers should be able to make the game they want to make. Someone else said that they have the responsibility to make it good, and that's true too.

If you don't like it... well, there are so many different games of so many different varieties to play that you should probably go play something else.

EDIT: Or, if you're on PC, see if you can mod out whatever you don't like.

@random45: The tentacled horror-eyed deathdemon-buckets made some of the scariest most warped enemies in the game, loved it. Terrifying encounters that even today are scary as I replay it for the Nth time on the PS3.

Speaking of fair, IGN's got the first 18 minutes of Bloodborne up and compared to the network test it's clear the final version has been made much more kind and fair, so much so that I believe it will help those who have never played anything like it before. Hard to get used to see a game that felt like a Hard mode I could conquer get tuned down into Normal model and become one I can dominate with one hand but I think it's for the better. More people will enjoy it - the rest of us can get NewGame+ for the challenge.

Which brings me to those of us who like something not a cakewalk, we need NewGame+. Modern Warfare's Arcade Mode replay of the single-player is still the best I've seen in an FPS and I would likely buy a COD every year if they offered a mode and a campaign quality that way. We'd be happy if games were universally nicer as long as there was an option for us to get a kick in the face after one lap of pat on the back.

You have the discretion of choosing what game to play, once you have it then you should play it as intended. Its as pointless as saying you want a version of titanic that has a happy ending. If you don't like the movie as it is then pick another movie.

Depends on the game.

Yeah. It depends.

No one should apply universal design rules to games. If you want to make a game that is unforgivably difficult and has no way around that, do it.

You choose which game to play. The idea that every game should be completely playable by every person is a surefire way to just ruin games. People say shit sometimes like "well anyone can watch any movie" and the truth is yeah, they can look at it, but they may not get it at all, enjoy it, want to watch it, etc. By the same token. Any one can watch any game (Twitch, YouTube) but not everyone can play it. And there's nothing wrong with that. Does it suck to buy a game you can't play? Yeah. But this is the nature of videogames. I wouldn't buy a car I couldn't drive or food that is too spicy for my stomach to handle. You need to know what you are doing, end of story.

I think if your game is supposed to be mainstream (Uncharted, Call of Duty, Halo, Batman, etc) than you probably owe it to yourself and your audience to provide as many options/settings/cheats as possible to allow as many people as possible to have fun.

Mass Effect is a good example of that. They have Story mode. Most very mainstream games probably should have an option like that.

I'm fine with hard games as long as they are fair. Rubberbanding and the like are bullshit though.

Yeah, 100%. This I agree with. Bummed me out a lot about Guacamelee! that there was a hard mode waiting around all this time but you had to beat the game first to get it. Sometimes sticking to tradition (unlocking difficulties) really hurts my enjoyment with a game.

Gamers and games should be heavily regulated by a newly formed UN agency that will ensure that they cannot contaminate the general public.

If it's a single player game do what you want, who cares?

So the player is saying they should be able to mod their game to break it and the developer saying not to break the game because that will make it less fun? In this case, neither has control over what the other person is doing so it doesn't really matter.

If I see you eating oranges by putting the peel in your mouth and discarding the juicy inside, I'll tell you that it's better to eat the juicy part, but you are free to ignore me. People eat mandarin orange peels as a snack (chenpi).

So I guess do what you want, but consider the developer of a game a good source of advice on how to enjoy it?

The argument has more meaning when phrased about what's actually in the game:

Player: "It's MY game. I bought it so it should have cheats, saves, and toggleable permadeath!"

Developer: "It's MY game. The game was designed this way. We won't include features that we don't think improve the experience. You won't like the game if you skip past all the content."

I side with the developer. You aren't required to enjoy what they provide. They don't have to make it fun specifically for you. If you don't like it, then accept that, and go play something else that you do like. Not every game has to be to your liking, in the same way not every song has to be in your favorite genre, or every movie has to have your preferred type of ending. There are other games, so go play those.

If you don't like permadeath, don't play games with permadeath. That's your choice as a player.

It depends on the game but generally the normal difficulty or harder than the developer intends seems to be the best for the majority of games.

One genre that needs to be addressed though is racing sim/semi sim games. Dumbing the difficulty down essentially turns them into arcade racers & ruins them. It's better for a player to take the time to learn how to drive & appreciate breaking for corners & learning driving lines than get instant gratification for a couple of hours & never play the game again.

As long as you don't give me pink ribbons and call me a ninja dog, I'm fine with playing however I want. If a game is going to be difficult no matter what, I always like a heads up first. Thankfully punishing difficulty was most of the Souls game's marketing so I felt jumping in was a fair gamble.

After messing around with stuff like the souls games I've become a big fan of games that do not condescend to their audience. Don't like it? Well, then it's not for you, and that's fine. That's not a philosophy that all games should adapt, but I find it admirable when it does show up.

The way I see it games are the products of their developers. Players have no entitlement on what the end product should be. If something is crappy about a game, then the consumption/market of the game will dictate its success. But at the end of the day, a developer has an idea or game in mind and they are the only ones who have a say on what the end product should be. If the game is too hard, you shouldn't have purchased it or you'll just not like that game. I suppose it's a little different with Kickstarter games if a developer promises one thing to gain supports but implements a different feature, but I'd have to think about that case separately.

Imagine for a film thinking "This movie was too long! It is unforgivable for the director to not make the movie the length I wanted it!" Just seems ridiculous.