Current Events > Fairness is more important than difficulty in games

(+) Yeah! (+)

Like, people talk all the time about wanting hard games, and they point to things like Dark Souls, and also to a lot of classic NES and SNES games.

Thing is, the difficulty is completely different when the game isn't fair to the player. Doesn't mean it's bad, just preference - some players prefer a little less fairness.

Take FPS games. The original Doom games are hard as heck, but generally pretty fair, because the rules are clear, you can dodge attacks, and the level design is mostly straightforward, though Doom 2 challenges this. But then the expansions are just bullshit, keeping the same fair mechanics but making the level design just brutal. Then you go to the Build engine games, and fairness goes out the window as you have mechanics that are specifically slanted against the players, like kamikazi enemies and hitscan weapons. Yet Blood, arguably the worst of this, is still one of the best FPS games of all time.

When people talk difficulty, they generally discern between real difficulty and "artificial difficulty", the latter of which is all the unfair bullshit. The former generally assumes fairness as part of the package.

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s0nicfan posted...

When people talk difficulty, they generally discern between real difficulty and "artificial difficulty", the latter of which is all the unfair bullshit. The former generally assumes fairness as part of the package.

True