During the heyday of arcade cabinets difficulty and monetization of video games were physically intertwined. You would put a quarter in the coin slot and... Boom! You can play the game until you run out of lives which was often pretty quick. For developers, the trick was to create a game that, when you watched it, you would go: "Oh, that's so easy!" The original Pac-Man is literally just one repeating level. How hard could that possibly be? [Pac-Man Death Sound FX] Very hard, is the answer- This was truly the first survival horror game. The ghosts... are just total dickheads. Just when you think you know, that the ghost thinks that you're going this way, turns out he knew you were thinking that and he went this way instead. If by some miracle you reached stage 19 you will discover that the power pellets no longer do anything. It's like, at this point of the game, the ghosts should say to you: "Nope!
You had your fun and now the game is over" "Goodbye!" Arcades were brimming with looping endless games that demanded one knee-jerk reaction after another. I mean, look at this! Can you describe to me what's happening here? How do you play that? These were games designed to kill you fast and suck down quarters and people loved them. Then, in the mid 80s, we see the focus shifting back towards consoles, with the NES. Games start to take on the structure of having a set amount of stages and with this change the role of difficulty is transformed. Now the challenge becomes:
"How do we stretch out a 30-minute game into something that will take months to complete?" The solution... "Nah! Just put a bunch of
stupid fucking bullshit everywhere." (Laughs) Cheap-ass one-hit kills, oblique puzzles, broken enemy spawns, impossible jumps, enemies that constantly knock you off a ledge- Go dig up an NES and tell me how many of those games you can actually complete. None of them! Don't lie!
You probably can't even complete Bubble Bobble. Look at you! Even the titles that were directed specifically at younger children make Dark Souls look like fucking DuckTales. Except that DuckTales is probably harder. Going forward, however games would continue to become more and more approachable as developers found out that people actually like to win. Red Dead 2 is a bright modern example of this. The game aims your gun for you, it steers your horse for you. It practically plays itself and despite all of this it is the most critically acclaimed game this year. Is it so wrong that people want to play a game without getting their dick knocked off every two seconds? No!
I don't think so. Not every game needs to be some death march, but when you try to have it both ways you run into problems. Selectable difficulties are commonly achieved by simply giving enemies more health and damage, but, in the back of my mind, I'm always wondering:
"How much should they have?" Halo 3 is the first game in the series that tells you "HEROIC" is how the game is meant to be experienced It just straight up says: "Hey! This is the real one.
Those other ones are fake." If only they told me this- Uh... back in Halo 2. COD 4 tells you that on Regular, "Your abilities in combat will be tested." which, if a dog picked up a controller with his mouth, that might be right. Veteran though, is actually pretty accurate. "Ok. We got-" "Oh" "We got two grenades" "I mean, that's-
(stutters) Fine" "Ok. Now, there's another one." "All right!" "Oh. There- There-
There-" "And..." "My own guy just picked up a grenade and threw it next to me." (Laughs) "Ok, now.
There's another grenade" "We're just gonna chuck that-" "Ok. And now, we just gotta wait for the flashbang to wear off" "What killed me?" When the difficulty is this blatantly artificial it trivializes your achievements. Some games do put in more effort, though. For Silent Hill 2... Uh... the easier difficulties cause the puzzles to make 4% more sense. This year's Megaman 11 is full of NES era horseshit. You have this part... and then, there's this part... and then, we got this classic part... These severe jumps in difficulty are just the result of poor design. Ideally, a game should get progressively harder as you play, but the reality is, most of them are like: Hmm... Hmm- HAI! Yee... WAH! Then you got Kirby... [Heartbeat Flatline Sound Effect] Then you got Donkey Kong Country which is like: "All right!" "We're gonna hit you with some difficulty bumps." "Minecart level," "hard-ass barrel part" "and then you get to K.Rool." This is where the game goes from tough, but fair... to tough, but "Fuck You!" If you're gonna lock me in a hell fuck, with a fucking Hitler bitch, then at least give me some decent checkpoints, man! Come on! Undoubtedly the cruelest part of older games is how when you lose, they will just kick you all the way back to the start. Even some of the hardest NES titles like Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden would have the courtesy of only knocking you back to the start of the stage when you got hit off a ledge by a guy who spawned in midair Uh... that you already killed. Without checkpoints, you force players to repeat large chunks of a video game, which is not only irritating, but fatal to the overall pacing. On the other hand... saturate your game with checkpoints and you lose that anxious feeling which makes challenging games so tense. The iconic bonfires of Dark Souls and not only a much-needed reprieve, but a glowing beacon of your progress, in a game whose atmosphere is dishearteningly oppressive. Meanwhile... Resident Evil 1, which is a game where doors take 17 minutes to open, requires you to use an Ink Ribbon item, every time you want to save. Fighting games are in a tricky spot where, if you play against the computer –and this is on the hardest difficulty, keep in mind– they're just Incapable of winning. Then you hop online and you fight this guy... Team games like Overwatch and Call of Duty lower the bar for entry considerably by allowing five other people to pick up your slack and... if you lose... you can just blame your team. When you're losing a fighting game, though. It's like: "Dude..." "Game sucks, not my fault." Many players, when they're met with a seemingly insurmountable challenge they just say: "Fuck this!" For me, that game was Bloodborne. When I played this in 2015, I couldn't even get past the first boss. It wasn't until last year that I actually figured out how simple these games are. Not to suggest it's easy, just simple. It's just dodge and hit. And once you understand that's dodge and hit, ♪ then you realize that the game ain't shit ♪
(rapping to the beat) - Pac. I think it's always better to be inclusive rather than exclusive. Take Ikaruga. This game is just... Ridiculous! What you're staring at here is, of course, Hard difficulty. Now, let's turn it down to Easy... "Ah, yeah!" "Now, this makes it much eas-" It doesn't pull punches yet. If you go into the settings, it allows you to have infinite lives. Now you may ask: "How can a game be challenging when you can't even technically lose?" Uh... Like this! "WHAT..." "THE..." "FUCK?!" "WHAT THE..." ""F..." "FUCK?!" I died so many times on that first run-through that, at one point, I thought I might run out of infinite lives. It was merely the first step and on subsequent playthroughs, I would go: "Oh, wow!
Only 68 deaths, this time." "Oh, wow!
50." "20" "13" Each time I returned to the game, I understood it a little bit better. Just like the 80s Coin-Ops that inspired it the idea of accomplishment doesn't stem from beating the game, but rather mastering it. The thing about difficult games is that they tend to grow on you, but... is it the challenge that makes them so exciting... or rather the artistry... hiding beneath? - Pac. [OUTRO]
♪ "Bonus Room Blitz" - Donkey Kong Country OST (SNES) ♪
Good checkpoint design is one of the hardest things to get right in a video game. It always needs to take into consideration the type of challenge to be overcome. One of the very noticeable changes I see in modern gaming, i.e. almost all big games from the last few years compared to those before is the inclusion of multiple checkpoints in multiphase final bosses. This is an extremely difficult choice to make because on the one hand, you'll want the last challenge of your game to be just that, a challenge, on the other hand it is also the point of the game that leaves probably the second largest impression (just after the opening) on the player and thus can be ruined by repetition.
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every skyrim playthrough should include a mod which turns higher difficulty damage into reciprocal increases, like if Legendary increased both player damage and enemy damage by 3x rather than the god awful 0.25x player damage vs 3x enemy damage Bethesda slaps onto every release
edit: here is a guide on how to change every difficulty level's multipliers in a simple INI edit https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/42352
Dunkey's point on inclusivity versus exclusivity and being easier to win at but difficult and gratifying to master is pretty major, and I think it's why a lot of people didn't mind Breath of the Wild's difficulty curve that plateaus after the first 20 or so hours.
It's a game where, even though learning to get through it doesn't get much more challenging after your first Lynels and Guardians. But shrine skips, experimenting with weird shit, insane levels of speedrunning, three heart runs, straight-to-Ganon runs, etc. are insanely gratifying in the game and do actually push a player to their limits.
Plus, the two DLC packs have some of the hardest combat scenarios and some of the hardest shrines in the whole game.
I just want to note he is not Kidding with the CoD4 Grenade Juggling on harder difficulties, the enemies can become really aggressive with additional grenade tossing.
He did also decide to take the hard path through that section of the map. It is probably the intended route, but if you hug the right wall, the enemies shift their attention to your allies mostly & you can flank em.
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Difficulty, like so many other decisions about a game are a design decision and I don't feel like a game being hard or easy should be a big matter of debate. Dark Souls isn't the same game with an easy mode and Journey would be totally different if it had a fail state.
I wish people accepted some games are hard and some are easy and that's okay. Also it's something people don't apply evenly. Platformers are often extremely difficult but people are used to a history of difficult platformers so it's acceptable but action games and shooters are often expected to have an easy option.
FUCK
NINJA
GAIDEN
The only way I beat the game was using save states on my DS. There are certain spots where you can have infinitely spawning enemies. NEVER STEP BACKWARDS. And that huge Blackbeard looking motherfucker that just jumps over you constantly while shooting three bullets over and over again.... fuck that man.
Cool how youtubers, dunkey included, somehow always find a clip from some random ass old/unknown game that is really relevant to their point. The giant tentacle monster smacking the player around, like how the hell do people find that shit? He must have played it, yes, but did he really play or find gameplay video of every single game he shows including Duck tales? How long did it take to find/record a clip of Ninja Gaiden being knocked by an enemy as he's talking about unfair deaths? Or the part where an enemy spawns mid-air near the player, right as Dunkey is making that point?
Maybe it does take a lot of time and effort to find that 1 second clip. Maybe he's some video editing god and has everything recorded and perfectly documented so he can just search for "unfair deaths" in his 2 PB harddrive. In any case, it's cool as fuck how youtubers do things like that