When I die in a game, I've never thought of it as "well, what a challenging game!", I've thought of it as me failing.
Skyward Sword for example. I've near the end and haven't died yet (except drowning once but that was being being stupid), yet I've come close a few times and overall I would say it's a challenging, if not hard game. If I'd gotten a few more game overs, I wouldn't suddenly think it was harder or more challenging, it would just be me sucking it up.
Maybe this is just a result of me playing too much Demon's/Dark Souls.
Basically, what I'm saying is is that you shouldn't be playing a game hoping for a game over to prove that it's challenging. All that happened there is that you lost.
This topic is pretty dumb, I guess I'm just bored.
Well, there's a difference between stuff like Prince of Persia ps3/360, where the game is still adequately challenging just not frustrating by having you never die, and stuff like....Fable 2.
I like games that make me think. if a game is only "challenging" because enemies do a ton of damage or because the controls are faulty, I don't like games like that.
Challenge doesn't really matter for enjoying a game the first time through, but it does for creating replay value. I'm going to spend a lot more time on a game that I have room for improvement on than a game I can already do well at.
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Challenge is something that is way too abstract for it to just be measured in deaths. A game like Super Meat Boy isn't hard because you die a lot, it's hard because it takes a lot of skill to get through. You can beat a hard level without dying a single time, that doesn't mean it's not hard.
If you are a quick learner and it takes you 1 or 0 deaths to acquire the skill to pass a difficult section of a game, and for someone else it takes 10 deaths to do the same, it doesn't mean the game is harder for one or the other, because the skill required to advance is still the same. It just means the latter guy sucks.
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It's not necessarily the challenge. It's the risk of failure. Victory means nothing in a vacuum; you need at least a small risk of failure for victory to be satisfying.
-- Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig. Started: July 6, 2005
From: Anagram | #013 It's not necessarily the challenge. It's the risk of failure. Victory means nothing in a vacuum; you need at least a small risk of failure for victory to be satisfying.
Right, but death isn't the only possible failure state.
Dauntless Hunter posted... Right, but death isn't the only possible failure state.
Yeah, but it's the most final and dramatic, and it's, y'know, a classic. A Game Over screen just has more going for it than an instant return to the beginning of the level or something.
EDIT: I'm not saying that a game needs death to be good or hard or something, I'm just playing Devil's Advocate here.
-- Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig. Started: July 6, 2005
I think the Uncharted series is good for this. They aren't hard in the sense of 'challenging' only in terms of cheap deaths through platforming or cheap gun fights.
Game overs mean nothing when you might restart a checkpoint 3 or 4 times in a row because of a failed jump.
Something like MGS can be challenging because even though you might escape and not have many game overs, the difficulty lies in the stealth action and executing sections well.
a game evidently isn't hard FOR YOU if you don't die. yes if you're very skilled you could conceivably get through a game that is 'hard' on some absolute scale without dying much, but that kind of metric isn't useful to anyone.
(obviously we are only talking about action games and the like here)
skyward sword is a very odd example - i didn't feel challenged by that game at all. you can take a ton of hits, there's a lot of healing available, and the enemy patterns are simple. consequently, you can't die except by 'being stupid' or 'sucking it up.'
also meat boy is not particularly hard. too many checkpoints. ---
I like games that make me think. if a game is only "challenging" because enemies do a ton of damage or because the controls are faulty, I don't like games like that.
You BEST not be talkin' 'bout the OG Resident Evils... !!
I agree with the sentiment that deaths don't automatically make a game hard.
However, they are a good determination of how hard a game can be. It's a much better metric than an abstract thing like "oh, I just have to redo this jump".
Also, a more challenging version of a game would generally be better to me as a whole. A recent example is Super Mario 3D Land.
Once I got through the first 8 worlds, I had over 100 lives because dying is hard, and not getting lives is basically impossible. At this point, there's no reason to even have lives, aside from the thing where if you die 5 times it ****s up your game save for the rest of its life.
The way it is now, I blew through the game in less than 10 hours (not to 100% the game, but to get every star coin). Paying $40 for a 10 hour game that provided no real challenge feels like a rip off. Now, if I had to restart stages a lot more (provided by difficulty and dying; actually making me use those lives I had stock piled) then I would probably have spent much more time with the game.
Also, once I fully 100% the game, the only thing the game is good for is speed running, but even then, anyone can speed run this game. The deaths would add an extra layer of skill that speed runners could use over non-speed runners, such as me. There's very little replay value, because there's no extra game modes or difficulty levels, it's just the base game with easy difficulty and generally only one path to go through the game.
Well to spin things around, take Sonic 2k6, I've died a lot in that game, but I never really thought the game was that hard, it just has really REALLY faulty controls and camera.
So it's not that challenging as a game, as a mental challenge though....
From: WhiteLens | #022 Well to spin things around, take Sonic 2k6, I've died a lot in that game, but I never really thought the game was that hard, it just has really REALLY faulty controls and camera.
So it's not that challenging as a game, as a mental challenge though....
I would say that real difficulty and fake difficulty are completely different things here though.
Fake difficulty (due to technical problems) is always bad anyway.
I like challenging games but I honestly don't want Zelda games to make me die a lot. I'd rather them be challenging to figure out. The combat isn't nearly as important as the puzzles.
Even really similar games within the same genre have different styles of difficulty.
Past a certain skill level, basically every DDR player can pass basically every song, but the game is still hard because the timing windows are pretty narrow, so the goal is to get a high score. I n Pump it Up, which is basically the exact same thing, the timing windows are super wide. If you have a pulse, hitting an arrow means getting a Perfect. To compensate, the songs are super-fast and require weird turns and stufff. The difficulty is in passing the songs, but once you're good enough to reliably pass, pretty much everyone gets about the same score.
And then there are games that thrive on what would be considered fake difficulty in another context. Super Meat Boy, God Hand, bullet hell games, etc. If I'm playing Mario, and all of a sudden there's a need for me to jump with perfect timing and perfect aim, I'm gonna consider it a cheap shot. In I Wanna be the Guy, though? Hell yeah :D
Everquest, LOTRO, and DCUO are all MMOs I've put at least 100 hours into. All of them have major flaws when it comes to difficulty.
Everquest: The game is, or was, pure difficulty. Levels took forever to gain, there were HUGE penalties for dying, good equipment was hard to come by (before I think Shadows of Luclin or Planes of Power when full set newbie quests were welcomed), danger was lurking around every zone, things that could go wrong would often go very wrong, regen takes forever, groups are almost a must, zones were huge and complex so you had to watch your step and not get in fights with aggro mobs 20 times your level, and there were no real maps. Plus, trying to figure out how to access some quests required complex dialogue at times that didn't just pop up for you to click on.
The game was long, difficult, and punished you for your mistakes. But that's what made it so fun. You learned not to go over to the glowing ruins north of Surefall Glade because some badass Skeletons were there that ripped you in half if you even got close. You learned to be on your toes running from Qeynos to Freeport because the Karanas are extremely deadly and Kithicor Forest at night murders everyone. You know you can't just be an idiot in a group because then everyone dies and dying really really sucks. You have to look out not only for yourself but for other players because you know what getting hit by a train of gnolls feels like. There's a community of survival to the game. It's not so easy that you can curbstomp it by yourself. The zones are an organism and when something goes wrong, everything in it can come crashing down.
LOTRO: Maybe it was a later date in joining, maybe it's the fewer players or zones, maybe it's the achievement system, but LOTRO felt like more of a grindfest than Everquest. There's less penalty on death, more fun with moves, and just a really great story and questlines, but it felt rather hollow. I can't describe it. There's just... less spontaneity to everything. All zones but Bree-Land seem to scale appropriately to the levels required, everything is more difficult the further you go east or north, grinding for rewards is awful (though hunting 1000 mosquitoes isn't nearly as bad as searching for 10 Giant Field Rat Whiskers in Qeynos Hills), and it feels quite empty. Again, quest progression is good and the tradeskill system is awesome and social, but it was harder to keep pushing forward in.
DCUO: Why am I even still playing this game when there are only two major non-DLC zones, an easily reachable level cap of 30, and just repetitive endgame content? All I'm doing is just buying better gear until I get raids. The combat system is a lot of fun and those duos/arenas/alerts and endlessly repeatable, but it's a mediocre game. And I still die all the time because that's just the way the game is and how a PvP server works, but it's still too easy otherwise. There's not much to do.
The saving point is that there's such a limited selection of things to do that all the players are usually available for those things so it's fun being in groups. Everquest, especially nowadays, you can't just stumble upon a bunch of groups in the Everfrost Peaks doing multiple various things. You're soloing or planning things out with people.
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Difficulty punished by death in horror games is a must.
Without death in those, then there's no real threat of doing things in the game.
A comparison example would be Doom 3 vs Quake.
Sure, Doom 3 has a lot more "horror" in its visuals, with it being super dark, with scary zombies and what not, but you realize half way through that you can just blast through **** easily.
On the other hand, Quake wasn't particularly dark, the monsters weren't particularly scary, and the graphics are much less detailed, yet I found it to be much scarier, because an enemy could come out and destroy you at any point.
My point is that death is a necessary consequence in the horror genre, and in many other genres, if they want to keep a good level of tension.