Game Informer - The Difficulty of Difficulty

[Silver]

Game Informer examines how developers strike the right balance between challenge and frustration. They compare games like Darkest Dungeon, XCOM 2 and Diablo III.

The most important factor for mitigating frustration is fostering the sense that every success and failure is earned by the player. "It's my job as a designer to promote fairness, to make sure that the rules of a game are transmitted clearly," says XCOM 2 creative director Jake Solomon. "...I mean fairness in the sense that when things happen, the player understands why, and how those things fit into the overall rules." Losing a beloved veteran soldier to a rampaging Muton Berserker in XCOM can be devastating, but it's also the direct result of your own choices - where you moved your characters, which enemies you targeted, etc. In other words, you may get frustrated with yourself, but not the game.

[...]

Diablo III lead designer Kevin Martens points to another vital component: player choice. "When a game gets difficult, there should be something that the player can learn or choose to do differently to overcome the difficulty," Martens says. Diablo III plies players with endless loot, weapons, and a variety of powerful abilities to overcome obstacles in the method of their choosing. If the player is still hitting a wall, they can also simply choose another activity such as Adventure mode or a tackling Greater Rift.

Darkest Dungeon provides a unique case study. Its roguelike nature and sheer amount of variance can lead to situations where the odds are severely stacked against the player. The solution? Give players a way out. "Without the ability to retreat, the player would feel at times that there is nothing they can do to overcome a bad deal of cards," says Darkest Dungeon design director Tyler Sigman. "It would be like forcing players to bet on a weak hand. We are every bit as interested in what you do when things are going poorly as when all is going great." The ability to retreat from fights and abandon quests doesn't just create an enticing risk/reward to mull over - it once again puts the onus on the player. If you push too hard and get your entire party killed by a ghoulish necromancer, their blood is on your hands, not the game's design.

More information.

 

[Swann]

Darkest Dungeon seems to be now the indie RPG with most media coverage. I don´t know why. The only notable feature of DD IMO are its artistic graphics and the unrealistic and frustrating psychological system. Apart from that, the game is repetitive and only the randomized deaths prevents from finish it in 10 hours.
If I were game dev I would like to have all this attention from critics.
Here are some curious data from SteamSpy, comparing Darkest Dungeon, and some random almost unnoticed RPG:

Portal Knights:
Release date: Feb 25, 2016
Price: $14.99
Score rank: 60% Userscore: 84%
Owners: 84,032
Peak concurrent players yesterday: 1,401

Battle Brothers:
Release date: Apr 27, 2015
Price: $19.99
Score rank: 87% Userscore: 93%
Owners: 18,359
Peak concurrent players yesterday: 336

Darkest Dungeon
Release date: Jan 19, 2016 (previously in Early Access)
Price: $24.99
Score rank: 65% Userscore: 86% Metascore: 84%
Owners: 756,886 ± 20,735
Peak concurrent players yesterday: 2,787

The notable thing is this: 1 out of 600 BB and PK owners played the game yesterday. But only 1 out of 3000 played DD! Besides, the score/price ratio of BB and PK is better than DD, but nevertheless DD sells a lot of more copies.
So, it seems that it is good for sales having constant and repetitive analysis about innovative blah blah and new approaches to blah blah.

The above article says about DD:
"If you push too hard and get your entire party killed by a ghoulish necromancer, their blood is on your hands, not the game's design."
This is an aseveration clearly not shared by a good part of users, and, BTW they seem to take the mickey out of them: you are idiots, we are genius.
Our hands are full of blood and theirs are full of money. That is for sure.

 

[Silver]

I kind of feel that way about Xcom 2 sometimes as much as I like the game. Aliens shooting me through walls is unfair because its buggy and its not intended behaviour. Hopefully they will fix it soon. But for the most part the result is understood and I can blame my own lack of tactics.

I don't own Darkest Dungeon and can't comment on it but I think its got the media attention because no-one has tried a psychological approach to combat; at least not to my knowledge. Sucks to hear its not been implemented well as I was contemplating buying it at some stage.

And yes I am as wary as you of 'genius' game developers. Only a few really deserve the title but I think Jake Solomon is at least competent.

 

[Archangel]

Darkest Dungeon seems to be now the indie RPG with most media coverage. I don´t know why. The only notable feature of DD IMO are its artistic graphics and the unrealistic and frustrating psychological system. Apart from that, the game is repetitive and only the randomized deaths prevents from finish it in 10 hours.
If I were game dev I would like to have all this attention from critics.
Here are some curious data from SteamSpy, comparing Darkest Dungeon, and some random almost unnoticed RPG:

Portal Knights:
Release date: Feb 25, 2016
Price: $14.99
Score rank: 60% Userscore: 84%
Owners: 84,032
Peak concurrent players yesterday: 1,401

Battle Brothers:
Release date: Apr 27, 2015
Price: $19.99
Score rank: 87% Userscore: 93%
Owners: 18,359
Peak concurrent players yesterday: 336

Darkest Dungeon
Release date: Jan 19, 2016 (previously in Early Access)
Price: $24.99
Score rank: 65% Userscore: 86% Metascore: 84%
Owners: 756,886 ± 20,735
Peak concurrent players yesterday: 2,787

The notable thing is this: 1 out of 600 BB and PK owners played the game yesterday. But only 1 out of 3000 played DD! Besides, the score/price ratio of BB and PK is better than DD, but nevertheless DD sells a lot of more copies.
So, it seems that it is good for sales having constant and repetitive analysis about innovative blah blah and new approaches to blah blah.

The above article says about DD:
"If you push too hard and get your entire party killed by a ghoulish necromancer, their blood is on your hands, not the game's design."
This is an aseveration clearly not shared by a good part of users, and, BTW they seem to take the mickey out of them: you are idiots, we are genius.
Our hands are full of blood and theirs are full of money. That is for sure.

Steam user score for less known and played games is not usually representative for comparison with games with lots of players. Less known and played games are usually found and played by those that are interested in such games and they would more often give it a positive rating.

Give battle brothers 700 000+ owners and you can be sure the score will go down.

 

[suibhne]

Darkest Dungeon's commercial success is due partly to its incredible sense of style. It absolutely oozes atmosphere, and its art style is sui generis (in gaming). That's not a knock against the game, either; artistic achievement is legit. But it says nothing about the game's actual gameplay systems.

Failure - a natural consequence of difficulty, right? - should be meaningful. It shouldn't just be a "game over" screen. Torment did decent work here, by providing gameplay that was accessible only through dying. Yeah, it got repetitive if you died a lot, but it made real sense if you only died a few times. Another approach is XCOM's or DD's - challenging you to manage a whole roster of heroes, so that you can experience consequences of an individual character's death while still moving forward on a macro level.

 

[Swann]

Give battle brothers 700 000+ owners and you can be sure the score will go down.

Surely you are right. But the point of my argument is not the players rating but how many owners really play a game. I own 100+ games on Steam but probably I have played 50+ hours only with 10% of them.
In part this is because even with some indie games you have the hype thing.
For instance, being a RPG player since 1990, I really need to buy and try Pillars of Eternity. The hype about PoE was overwhelming even for my hipster prejudices! After the first Act I get bored and never gave it another try. The result: 36 hours of boring gameplay and 40€ lost.
IMO the most prominent game critics have made another indy-hype with DD, and only knowing that you can explain why a 2D roguelike game so frustrating and repetitive has sold 700.000+ copies. You have a lot of games like this and probably better -or at least, more casual/noob/clumsy friendly- with less than a thousand sales. Why? Probably because they are almost absolutely ignored by the media.

 

[Archangel]

Of course media makes a difference, that is not in question. I was talking about why correlation of user score and game popularity is not a correct one without additional factors taken into account

 

[Swann]

Ok. But the thing that intrigues me is... (just curious, I am not a game developer) How an indie game wins the media unanimous attention?

 

[Archangel]

Ok. But the thing that intrigues me is… (just curious, I am not a game developer) How an indie game wins the media unanimous attention?

Something between Luck and giving blowjobs.

 

[Swann]

Something between Luck and giving blowjobs.

Mmm... I conclude that I am enough lucky not to be game developer, so I do not need the other thing

 

[you]

We should consider grim dawn in the above math

 

[Deleted User]

I love hard games. I want my RPGs to be punishing, difficult endeavors. In the end, I feel much more accomplished if I toppled some hard-to-crack type of game, rather than a cakewalk.

I very rarely ever get frustrated at games. I never ragequit. It's just not how I'm wired. I keep trying to overcome the obstacle until eventually I do and I feel better about it. But I'm never like, angry at the game.

Icewind Dale is a good example. My dad and I died so much in the various encounters in that game, that I feel weaker-willed players would have definitely quit (especially our battles against the demons in the game). However, we simply continued and applied new tactics every time, until finally we broke through. And we both loved reaping the rewards of the difficult encounters, for sure.

So, give me difficulty options that I can turn up to tailor the game to my liking. Love that Pillars of Eternity has a Torment level, for example. Haven't tried it yet but I'm sure it would be interesting for me.

Now, I'm going back to the PS1 remake of the original Wizardry trilogy.

 

[Carnifex]

Whine whine whine, go play Wizardry one-three for about six months straight, then come talk to me about difficult games. Xcom two was a breeze compared to what I consider truly difficult games.

 

[Archangel]

Mmm… I conclude that I am enough lucky not to be game developer, so I do not need the other thing

Oh but you are not getting the other thing, it is other way around

 

[ChaosTheory]

"Losing a beloved veteran soldier to a rampaging Muton Berserker in XCOM can be devastating, but it's also the direct result of your own choices - where you moved your characters, which enemies you targeted, etc. In other words, you may get frustrated with yourself, but not the game."

True for XCom: EU/EW, not true for XCom 2. Many enemies in the sequel have abilities that will punish you no matter what you do, and to me, that's "cheap"... Also explains why, despite many improvements elsewhere, I'm having less fun with it.

 

[lackblogger]

There's difficult challenging and then there's difficult obnoxious, two completely different things.

For those of you who remember arcade games, the concept of the game-over screen was designed to make you put more quarters into the machine in order to continue the game. Because of this, death was often obnoxious and unavoidable by any means other than trial and error. Literally, the equivalent of having two identical doors to choose from, one is an unavoidable death trap while the other is safe. There's no skill or thought involved beyond learning which is which by applying new quarters.

Now take chess. There's nothing hidden about chess, it's all there for you to see and the rules are fully laid bare, the game over screen is entirely your own fault (unless it's timed chess) and the level of your ability to stay alive rests entirely on your own skills.

Most PC games are a combination of both, making default points about specific games over others somewhat futile as the word 'difficult' alone doesn't fully describe what's happening. And in a scenario where you don't have to keep pumping quarters, even trial and error can be fun in its own right when its delivered competently.

There's also classic PC/console difficulty separation between purely mental challenges and primarily physical challenges to consider, such as twitch versus turn/pause-based, both of which have a variety of difficulty criteria which are incomparable with each other.

Ultimately, most games are required to be at least somewhat difficult in some way, even if it's just the learning process, otherwise people wouldn't bother with them, they'd get bored very quickly (interactive novels and simulators/pure sandboxes etc excluded, of course, as these aren't really 'games' anyway)

 

[Bedwyr]

There's difficult challenging and then there's difficult obnoxious, two completely different things.

For those of you who remember arcade games, the concept of the game-over screen was designed to make you put more quarters into the machine in order to continue the game. Because of this, death was often obnoxious and unavoidable by any means other than trial and error. Literally, the equivalent of having two identical doors to choose from, one is an unavoidable death trap while the other is safe. There's no skill or thought involved beyond learning which is which by applying new quarters.

Now take chess. There's nothing hidden about chess, it's all there for you to see and the rules are fully laid bare, the game over screen is entirely your own fault (unless it's timed chess) and the level of your ability to stay alive rests entirely on your own skills.

Most PC games are a combination of both, making default points about specific games over others somewhat futile as the word 'difficult' alone doesn't fully describe what's happening. And in a scenario where you don't have to keep pumping quarters, even trial and error can be fun in its own right when its delivered competently.

There's also classic PC/console difficulty separation between purely mental challenges and primarily physical challenges to consider, such as twitch versus turn/pause-based, both of which have a variety of difficulty criteria which are incomparable with each other.

Ultimately, most games are required to be at least somewhat difficult in some way, even if it's just the learning process, otherwise people wouldn't bother with them, they'd get bored very quickly (interactive novels and simulators/pure sandboxes etc excluded, of course, as these aren't really 'games' anyway)

Yeah, that's a similar line for me. If I detect obnoxious lazy repetition in an effort to twiddle the balance towards difficult, I'll drop the game pretty quickly. I have to spend my day solving difficult problems. I'm less inclined to put up with foolishness and shenanigans. Difficult games can be stomached if after a drubbing I can basically say "ok, fair cop; you got me."

 

[Celerity]

I find that the article is incoherent clickbait. It randomly jumps between games that generally are difficult (XCOM), and games that are only considered difficult as part of a meme, but are actually quite trivial (Darkest Dungeon), and games that are not difficult by any sane person's metric (Diablo III). It then basically says you make difficult games by removing all the teeth from difficulty and just making it a massive grind (ok, I guess that's why one of those games is there) instead of ya know, a challenge you overcome. I suppose if regarded in the meta sense it explains why difficult games are in such a poor state with the word having lost almost as much meaning as "Roguelike" if this article reflects the common view, but much more likely it's a typical reviewer name dropping things he has at best 5 hours understanding of.

As is, Swann raises an excellent point. Very few people have maintained interest in Derpest Dungeon despite all the constant flash and show or perhaps even because of it. A better metric though is that one achievement you get for completing a single quest. As of now, almost 2 months after Early Access release fewer than half (47.0%) of users have this, meaning over half never even considered looking at the game after launch. And when you consider the context (glacial, delay ridden development and an overall degenerating, overcentralized, trivial, one dimensional game state that substitutes grind for actual content, depth, and difficulty) one can easily infer why that might be. Combine that with some of their other failings (censoring critics, buying off Twitch streamers and other reviewers as their main source of promotion) and you get a lot of noise about what is basically a flash game/walking simulator/casual farm fest. But hey, if it keeps new people coming in so they can keep discarding old ones like the proverbial Suicide Squadees they'll keep doing it.

Even ignoring the various problems with the developer's massive egos, there's very little game. You know those week 1 videos of people doing dark runs with entire teams of Hellions? The game actually never advanced beyond that point. Moon Ring, Quick Draw Charm, damage spam, kill target screen before it moves (except now you do 40 damage instead of 15). All the other classes and mechanics have ironically gotten worse, and they were pretty laughably bad in the first place. Sure, a lot of noobs think it changed because your AoE spam debuffs your damage after you've already killed the screen with it but... you've already killed the screen with it.

The biggest metric though is that any game that were actually difficult would result in me getting rekt quite consistently for a while, I would never instantly master something that didn't start off trivial because as much of a challenge gamer as I am I'm not actually that good at games. Examples include Wizardry 4, Elminage Gothic, and a few projects of my own.

TL;DR: If you make a lot of money, and spend it all on advertising and marketing instead of actually fixing and completing your game you get Derpest Dungeon style Early Access patches after release, and all shiny no substance flash games.

 

[Swann]

Celerity has argued perfectly what I was trying to say.
And my own moral of the story is "Beware! Indy guys are not always nice guys"

 

[Silver]

Well if the article is not to anyones taste I am open to suggestions about what news you would prefer me to link to.