10 Game Difficulty Mechanics We All HATE

video games can be very difficult however when that difficulty isn't genuine when it's fake i mean it just kind of sucks hi folks it's falcon and today on game ranks 10 dumb game difficulty mechanics we hate starting off at number 10 when higher difficulty just means bigger numbers and when it comes to difficulty levels this just comes up way too often like instead of making the game harder by making the enemies smarter or more numerous or changing up the level layouts or anything that could be interesting and introduce new variables to the game they just make it so the enemies take more hits and you take less hits as an easy example this can be found in pretty much every single call of duty campaign there is absolutely nothing different about them it's just that you die faster than if you played it on an easier setting of course that alone can make the game more interesting and engaging i mean it is a balance issue and it may be that the hard mode is a more balanced game i can't tell you but when the developers barely put any time into testing these difficulty levels that's just it's super annoying like say borderlands 2's ultimate vault hunter mode which gives enemies about four times as much health as the previous difficulty and on top of that it regenerates the enemies are bullet spongy enough in borderlands games but this is i mean it's it's beyond ridiculous honestly this sort of fake difficulty pops up so often it's almost pointless to try to come up with examples it's rare that a game actually does something interesting with its difficulty options most of the time you get this it just depends on whether these kinds of difficulty options are actually fun or if they just turn the game into a total slog like maybe normal you just take too much damage therefore hard works better that's not enough though right and number nine is frustrating time limits you know when the game puts you on the clock and barely gives you enough time to succeed like okay so this one is just basically all about dead rising uh in the first dead rising games you're just constantly on the clock if you didn't get to a certain location before time expired the story would just fail you'd have to restart the whole game they gave you a little more leeway in dead rising 2 and especially 3 but you are still on the clock at all times and if you're late it would be game over and it's not like it's all you had to do the original dead rising was constantly bombarding you with tasks like rescuing people or dealing with psychos so you always had to keep in mind how much time you had to do anything which on one level did make the game more interesting sure but it also made it really frustrating at times another game that used time limits was legend of zelda majora's mask this one like dead rising is sort of a love it or hate a game and a lot of people love how unique majora's mask is while others find the time limit just too strict remember in majora's mask you've got three in-game days to do your thing before this freaky moon comes and crashes into the world but you can reset back to the first day at any point so it's not too frustrating but when you get into dungeons and this whole mechanic gets i mean really nerve-wracking because you have to get to the dungeon and beat the boss as quickly as possible otherwise you will have to redo the whole thing and i mean everything you have to resolve all the puzzles recollect the keys everything number eight is two long checkpoints a classic annoyance that is becoming more rare in recent games but it has not completely gone away having these huge chunks of the game you have to replay because there's a lack of checkpoints probably one of the most infamous examples is ninja gaiden from the nes if you die at any point during the last act which covers six one through six five including the final boss's three forms you have to go all the way back and not to the start of level six five you gotta go way back to six one it is brutal and a big reason why this game is considered as hard as it is a big part of the challenge of dark souls for instance is sometimes there are not enough checkpoints probably the worst game in regards to this is demon souls you only ever get a checkpoint at the start of a level and then another one after you beat a boss and that is it so you pretty much have to completely redo a section if you die at a boss and probably the worst boss run in the entire soulsborne series can be found in the shrine of storms leading to the old hero boss fight it's just a brutal gauntlet that basically forces you to fight a lot of the enemies rather than just run past them honestly it's a lot harder than the actual boss at the end of it another series that suffers from this is the gta series it took until gta 5 to fully incorporate mid mission checkpoints until then if you died during a mission in any of the previous ones you had to start the whole thing over again even in like super long multi-part missions this is the main reason the older gta games are hard to go back to because rockstar finally went all in on checkpoints in gta 5 just a godsend and number seven is trial and error gameplay anytime a game simply expects you to constantly replay a section to get it exactly right otherwise you just die like with certain horror games it is just rife with sequences like this where you have to run away from a monster and follow a precise sequence of actions and if you don't do them right you die and you have to restart that kind of thing like it can work this is basically how games like inside play but some games are really terrible about signposting what you need to do and it is just it's so frustrating because of it probably the worst games of this sort of thing outlast 2 it's your standard guy gets hunted with the creepy cult type story but once in a while you're expected to pull off an insane escape sequence like the problem with the game's visuals here is that they're so dark and muddy a lot of the time you really can't tell what the game wants you to do and that's fully the problem with these sequences in this game another truly terrible sequence of this nature can be found in the alone in the dark game from 2008 uh there's a car escape sequence where you have to get away from this collapsing city and the game it just expects absolute perfect driving from you even this is the first time you've ever driven a car in the game there are so many games that pull us don't like this but it feels like recently it's been horror games that have been most guilty of it it would be nice if that were a trend that stopped number six is buggy and glitchy game mechanics like this is an obvious one bugs are glitches that make a game exponentially harder like a buggy game that would normally be something that's a cakewalk but it turns into a hair pulling exercise and frustration like try playing a game with unresponsive controls or ones that'll just crash randomly it's the worst like okay perfect example for you is sonic 2006 this is just to call it infamously buggy is an understatement it is infinitely buggy it has it all it's got the awkward controls especially during the mach speed sections that they just make you fly off course and just takes a slight tap with a controller to fly off your untimely death there's all these annoying platforming sections where you can fall through the world by mistake it's got automatic sections they're really awkward to control you'll go in the wrong direction sometimes it's not even you that makes it go in the wrong direction it's just zero input and it's like ah let's go the wrong way it's all incredibly frustrating and just to be clear it's not something that only shows up in the worst of the worst like sonic 2006 we've actually seen a lot of buggy releases in the past year and even some of the biggest aaa releases with the highest budgets out there i am looking at you cyberpunk 2077 run into problems from bugs however the of sonico 6 is it's so high that even today it's just a perfect example at number five is confusing difficulty names like sometimes just selecting the difficulty level can be annoying especially in games where they don't explicitly tell you what the normal mode even is probably the worst games for this is the gamecube original beautiful joe there's two difficulty modes kids and adults any sane person out there would think that adult mode is the normal mode and kid mode is the easy one right wrong kids mode is actually the normal mode while adult mode is hard and now that you've selected it there is no going back if it starts getting too tough for you and it will you have to restart the game entirely this could be really annoying in games that have two normal difficulty settings as well like call of duty's regular and hardened difficulties the actual difference between the two is super vague but that'll possibly lead you into playing a game at a difficulty much harder than you expected and thankfully for those games at least you can change the difficulty level at any time but still at number four is these impossible puzzles like this one's pretty obvious right a good puzzle game will give you that eureka moment where the puzzle comes together you know feel super smart for solving it right a bad puzzle game however makes you throw up your hands and say how was i supposed to figure that out when you finally end up brute forcing the solution sometimes games just do not give you enough information or they add rules that don't make any sense or they just make everything too obscure confusing and it turns a game that should be difficult into something that players will absolutely hate and when it comes to puzzle games what's almost impossible for you might be totally obvious for someone else there's no surefire thing that says objectively if a puzzle is too hard or not it really does come down to the individual playing the game maybe one of the worst examples of this though can be found in the witness normally this game's puzzles are great but that one puzzle in the jungle is just the worst if you've played this game you know exactly what i am talking about with this set of puzzles you have to input these chirping sounds into the puzzle with another set of chirps interrupting that one that makes things even more annoying like my blood pressure is raising just describing this like sound-based puzzles categorically are bad enough on their own but adding additional noise makes it harder to tell what's going on and the actual solution is the sort of thing you would expect you have to input the distraction chirps instead of the normal ones but good luck telling them apart basically any game can have these kinds of puzzles not just puzzle games but if you run into one it's gonna ruin your day and number three when easy modes cut out content like this is a really annoying one that still shows up a lot these days like when the game doesn't let you finish because you played it on easy one of the nastiest examples can be seen in contra 4 where it just stops before the final stage and makes fun of you for playing uneasy i'm not going to pretend that i'm playing all these games on easy mode but a lot of cognitively disabled people are and doing that thing kind of sucks not to be a snowflake or anything but come on we want more people playing games and we want everyone to be able to play them right another nasty example shows up in time splitters too like if you play on easy the levels are about half as long as they normally would be and you'd think this sort of thing would have disappeared by now but it's still showing up in games like in cuphead if you select simple it just makes it so you can't fight the last two bosses and number two is confusing dynamic difficulty certain games try to make a game more fair by having a dynamic difficulty that is to say when a difficulty level will go up and down depending on how well you play the game like do better and the difficulty goes up making the game more challenging or do worse and the difficulty goes down just compensates adjust the game to the player good stuff right at least on paper however it can sometimes lead to situations where the game can get way too hard or way too easy without really telling the player why case in point the original max payne would get harder if you killed more enemies and took less damage like that would be good but the problem is that death would come in seconds and for most players that meant they would be saving constantly and because you die so fast most players wouldn't wait for the death animation to end to give you the option to load instead they would just quick load back to a previous save so for most people the game would think that they're doing really well because they never die so the game would just get harder and harder and harder another infamous example of dynamic difficulty gone wrong is final fantasy viii the game scales enemies to match your party so it basically makes grinding of any kind at all pointless because you never really get stronger than enemies just by leveling up if you played this game without realizing that and let's say you hit a tough boss you could potentially waste hours of your time grinding to level up without realizing that it's a total waste of time of course this also led players to discover ways to completely break the game by avoiding leveling up but that's sort of unrelated to what we're talking about here bottom line these dynamic difficulty levels can really suck sometimes and finally number one and let's just say that this one covers a lot of ground but cheating ai basically any time the artificial intelligence gets to break the rules of the cam like it's something that's basically everywhere in gaming too like if you play any civilization style game you pretty much have to go in expecting the ai to cheat like crazy like they get free resources they can build cities wherever they want and you have to build yours at least four tiles apart hell in civilization revolution the ai can teleport their units through the fog of war so they can just attack you from any direction this sort of thing can be seen in other genres too like in the original f-zero where if you're playing on master mode the ai will just always be at max speed and have perfect handling even if you manage to get in front of them they're just right behind you and it doesn't matter how much you think you should be getting ahead they will always be right behind you another genre that ai cheats like crazy is fighting games like they're not as bad these days but like back in street fighter 2's era the ai could do stuff like perform charge moves without having to actually you know charge remember charge moves work in street fighter by holding a certain direction for a second but the ai can pull off these kinds of moves without stopping and even while moving in the opposite direction it's just completely unfair the funny thing is that nowadays yes a lot of the games do have ai that does things that make them easier little things like having ai enemies and fps games shoot you less or just flat out do less damage if you're not looking at them and even intentionally move into your field of view so they're easy to shoot at but for most games there's always going to be some ai cheating going on sometimes frankly it's not bad but sometimes it is really annoying but at the moment it's also pretty much unavoidable that's all for today what do you think about these do you experience these have you noticed them are you gonna be able to unsee them leave us a comment let us know what you think if you like this video click like if you're not subscribed now's a great time to do so we upload brand new videos every day of the week the best way to see them first is of course a subscription so click subscribe do not forget to enable all notifications and as always we thank you very much for watching this video i'm falcon you can follow me on twitter falcon the hero and we'll see you next time right here on game ranks

Channel: gameranx

Views: 804,220

Rating: 4.89359 out of 5

Keywords: difficulty mechanics, video game difficulties, hardest game difficulties, bad game difficulty, video game design, gamer culture, video game culture, gaming culture, gamer problems, gameranx, falcon, hard games, hard game tricks, worst game checkpoints

Id: d4LhFHZHhrQ

Length: 14min 49sec (889 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021