Weekly Musings: Difficulty in Games

By tokyochicken July 22, 2008 9 Comments

Welcome to a little feature I plan on doing every week where I just talk about whats on my mind in the gaming world.

Now most hardcore gamers are no stranger to difficult games. In days of our past that was what games were littered with. Nowadays though things are different games are a lot more easier now. Some gamers will say that we have come to a time where gamers are too pampered now and that games are not as nearly as challenging as before. Now that is true, but is that a bad thing or a good thing? In a way its a bad thing for people who grow bored of the less challenging gameplay but on the other side it can ruin the experience for some.

In most cases for myself I am very interested in keeping my level of immersion high. Most of the time for me it is all about the experience of the stories and the new worlds I can experie

nce.  In most cases I can ignore a lot of gameplay flaws if the world I'm being immersed in is a good one. That immersion can be destroyed by dying a lot on a certain point. When I begin to focus too much on the gameplay aspect of things I start to lose that suspension of belief and that ends up ruining my experience. So for the most part I always enjoy games that engage me rather than challenge.

So this is my idea, is it really a bad idea for game developers to make the gameplay engaging rather than challenging the player. First off I should explain what I mean. Instead of the developer throwing an extremely hard obstacle in front of you, they give you something where you try it once and fail but then learn how to get past said obstacle. By doing this they prevent the player from getting frustrated but make them feel like they accomplished something by learning how to solve an obstacle. 

In some sense, I find that developing a game that can intuitively engage the player is a lot harder than just throwign insane challenge at them. Anyone can just throw really hard monsters at a person and expect them to die a lot before they get them, but I think it takes work to keep the play immersed while throwing interesting puzzles or challenges that can still make them feel rewarded but still not frustrating them. At this point it really seems unrealistic to demand something liek that without the game turning out more easier than it should be, but I feel it is an interesting idea to have a game that can make a player feel rewarded without frustrating them. But that brings up another theory in mind, what if you need that challenge to feel the reward. Is it impossible to feel any kind of achievement with out it beating you over the head over and over?

Although, I am not saying they can't coexist. I think a game with a crazy difficulty can be fun, I can say I feel danm cool when I can down that hard boss, but whos to say we can't a game with a easier difficulty and it can still be fun. They're are always going to be an extreme on both sides of difficulty. Many deveolpers have tried to please everyone with their difficulty curve but have leaned over to one side more than the other. Either way people are going to have they're preference on difficulty and thats great. At some point we make get to the time where games are able to hit a happy medium in difficulty. I mean who knows what the future stores right?

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