As God is my witness, I’ll never empty that chamber pot again.
The first video game I ever considered “hard” was King’s Quest 3. I was very young, playing on a PC that couldn’t even show color graphics, and was never able to even make it down the mountain from the old wizard Mannanan’s home. The open-ended nature of the commands made playing the game confusing, the path down the mountain proved perilous to the point of impossibility and the complete lack of any tutorial system or tip structure left me in the dark. If I didn’t fall off the path to my death or anger Mannanan enough to destroy me, I usually had to give up on the game when my mother said it was time to get off the computer.
I loved every minute of it, even though I never beat the game. When the internet finally came to our small corner of the world, my brother found a walkthrough and followed it all the way through, defeating the wizard and saving the hero’s family. For me, however, reaching the conclusion didn’t bring me as much joy as living through the mystery of just who the hero Gwydion was and how he was supposed to defeat the wizard and find his freedom.
To this day, “hard” games continue to enjoy a strong following among video game players, while at the same time the changing demographics of gamers are creating a lot of debate and discussion over terms such as “hardcore” and “casual.” Critics celebrate new and innovative challenges in games, while players call on those same games to be more challenging or less difficult, often at the same time. There are even designers and companies who have said it’s more valuable to reduce the difficulty of a game so more people can access it, rather than spend a lot of resources creating the perfect challenge only a select few can overcome.
Which brings us to the big question: how difficult should a video game be? Should it punish the weak and challenge the mighty? Should it include options so anyone can win, even if their reward is a lowly participation trophy? Is it possible to create a game that’s both a challenge, and at the same time accessible?
Hard vs. Challenging
Don’t forget your iron rations!
If I had a mountain with a zen master on top of it, I might climb up and ask him that question. His face would crinkle, and his response would probably be something along the lines of “You ask the wrong question, foolish grasshopper. First, you must ask… what is hard? Also, go and punch that rock until sundown, it builds character.”
Joel Bylos, the Lead Content Designer for Funcom’s The Secret World, knows a thing or two about challenges. He grew up on games the same way I did, only instead of wizards and mountains he faced sewers and Otyughs in the SSI game, Curse of the Azure Bonds.
“I played it on C64 and I remember being utterly confused by the ruleset,” Bylos said. “I had no D&D experience, I was 8 and living in a small town in Australia where normal kids played outside… I remember just getting into random encounter after random encounter until finally my mage found a scroll of Stinking Cloud, and that changed everything.”
Bylos said while the giant sewer monsters kept him from being able to move forward in the game, he never felt like he was being treated unfairly.
“I don’t remember being frustrated with the game, I was just really happy to get past those Otyughs,” he said. “That is something that I think has been a shift in the industry. In the early days, games were like a puzzle box and you had to sort of decipher the package and learning the rules was a part of the experience. Now people want everything served and ready to go so that they can get into the action.”
There’s a key lesson Bylos said he tells all his designers: a game’s challenge should make players feel frustrated not with the game, but with themselves. If they feel the game is unfair or broken, they’ll walk away. If they feel like what’s lacking is their own abilities or knowledge, they’ll stay and play.
For me, that boils down the difference between a game that is “hard”, and a game that is “challenging.” One can be overcome, the other just feels like a brick wall, and I know which experience I’d rather shell out $60 for.
Raise your hand if it took you waaay too long to figure this out on your own. Those of you not raising your hands are filthy, filthy liars.
That lesson can be seen at work in one of The Secret World‘s most interesting features, its investigation missions. These can sometimes take players out of the game entirely, sending them on a scavenger hunt across the internet for clues Funcom has hidden specifically for their game, or require them to think outside the typical MMO box and keep a sharp eye on their surroundings to solve the mission’s puzzles. Everything the players need is given to them, they just have to look for it in a different way than they are accustomed to. While many have praised this feature (including VGW in our review of The Secret World), it also fills the game’s chat channels and forums with people who either don’t understand why the game suddenly became so difficult, forcing them to observe and think instead of just click a shiny collectible or kill a group of enemies, or just don’t want to spend the time thinking of the solution on their own so they get to the reward as quickly as possible, and get back to leveling.
Designing Difficulty
At their base, all games are about overcoming a challenge to receive a reward. In video games that challenge could be physical, such as hitting a button at just the right time or in the right sequence; mental, such as remembering which part of the mysterious island the red door that matches the key you just found was at, or a combination of both. The rewards can also be just as varied; levels, items, story advancement or even just a higher score on the leaderboards.
One of the first questions many game designers must answer, then, is what sticks to use and which carrots to offer at the end of those sticks. Sometimes the answers seem obvious, as in the case of a first-person shooter: who doesn’t want bigger guns, right? But those aren’t always the only rewards: in the Halo series reaching the next chapter of the story was as big a reward as picking up an energy sword, while in Bulletstorm some of the biggest rewards came not from advancing but in replaying levels to get increasingly-complex kills and bigger scores as a result. In some cases, the stick and the carrot might actually be reversed, such as Metal Gear Solid’s later titles; it can feel like an accomplishment just sitting through the convoluted story long enough to get the change to shoot someone in the head.
We’re not sure what ‘Kick of Doom’ is, but we’re pretty sure it isn’t PG-13.
Careful choice of sticks and carrots can also affect the longevity or replayability of a game. In single-player Halo, enemies follow a linear increase in difficulty and players mow through them en masse, largely on rails. Once you reach the end, you can always face tougher enemies by ratcheting up the difficulty, or go online to play a completely different kind of game. In Epic Game’s Bulletstorm, though, finding new and innovative ways to “kill with skill” gave the game additional replay value; you might quickly mow through one group of enemies, but then on replay find a new, stylish, and more-rewarding way to eliminate them all in one massive and skillful display of carnage. Here the players choose how high they want to set their own bar, while before they just passively accepted the challenge set before them by the game’s designers.
However, that doesn’t mean every “good” game has to have the same moving parts in it to achieve success and high sales. Bylos said he sometimes has junior designers confused about negative feedback from people playing their games, arguing that they were missing the point of their challenge or design.
“Players don’t play intentions,” Bylos said, “they play what is put before them and it is down to the gameplay to communicate… If the rules are not clear or you expect the player to bend the rules in ways which they have not been taught, your game is too hard. If the player understands the rules and understands the challenge then the onus is on the player to meet that challenge.”
When that communication is done well, Bylos argues, players will take on all kinds of puzzles, odds and difficulties, so long as they know what they’re getting themselves into. He uses the example of Dark Souls, which thrived on the reputation of its “hardcore” predecessor, Demon’s Souls, and a catchy “Prepare to Die” marketing campaign which told players up front they were going to be in for a rough time. The risk in presenting one difficulty to kill them all is some players will be put off or simply unable to complete the game, but it’s a choice that seems to have paid off for Dark Souls and Namco Bandai, who reported more than 1.19 million in sales a few months after its release in the U.S. and saw a massive fan petition to bring the game to PC.
“IT’S A LOT OF FUN! REALLY!”
Bylos said they took a similar approach implementing investigation missions in The Secret World, signaling to players that certain choices or missions would mean a higher bar to clear.
“We knew that investigation missions would be hard. So we made sure that the first one was very hard, to set the tone,” he said. “However, the puzzles on the story mission are far simpler, and that is because we expect most people to want to see the story.”
This idea of difficulty and accessibility has also been hotly debated with the Big Daddy of MMOs, World of Warcraft. Starting with their second expansion, the designers at Blizzard began dialing back the difficulty of endgame content in order to make it possible for more people to see it. Instead of 40-player raids that had been a mainstay for prior MMOs, there were 10- and 25-player raids; long grinds for specific items like resistance gear started getting dialed back as well, and in its next expansion Blizzard started adding progressive buffs or debuffs for raids over time to give more players the edge they needed to see the end of the expansion’s story and get some of the best rewards, accomplishments which would have been completely inaccessible to them before.
“Back in my day, it took 40 people all night to even attempt to kill me.”
The argument for this approach was that Blizzard and players were both getting more bang for their buck. More people got to experience the result of the designers’ hard work, which kept players playing (and paying subscriptions) longer. Some players bemoaned this as the “dumbing down” of World of Warcraft, that Blizzard caved to the pressure of more “casual” players who couldn’t put in hours and hours of raiding each week to achieve the same success.
The trick, according to Bylos, is knowing when to listen to the players and when to accept that sometimes, there’s just no pleasing everyone.
“You should never… allow communities to decide your intentions,” he said. “You need a clear vision and direction for what you want to create in terms of difficulty and you need to always work towards that. People will either like that vision and jump on board, or they won’t and they’ll move on. Trying to please everybody usually just ends up pleasing nobody.”
Difficult Video Games — The Bottom Line
Today’s video game market is very different from 15 or even ten years ago. The people buying and playing King’s Quest or Curse of the Azure Bonds were a very narrow set of consumers, and games were made for them, not for millions of people from all walks of life. As the market has grown, the different types of consumers have grown with it, which has led companies to make the hard choices balancing accessibility, which could mean enough sales to support the increasingly-massive budgets some video games require, and a specific vision for the game and the challenges it presents, even if that means fewer sales as a result.
Seriously. Get used to seeing that. A lot.
“I don’t think it is possible to get it just right for everybody,” Bylos told me, “but I do think it is possible to ensure that your intentions of what should be challenging content, and what shouldn’t be, are met.”
Today, part of me still wishes Sierra Entertainment had included a few helpful hints in King’s Quest 3 (or at least straightened out the mountain path so it wasn’t only a few pixels wide), but the rest of me admires the person who wrote the walkthrough which finally allowed my brother and me to beat the game. Did they struggle through the earlier King’s Quest titles and knew something we didn’t? Did they just happen to have the kind of brain you need to figure out things like text adventures and MUDs? Or were they a designer for the game who thought “There’s just no way people will be able to figure this out, maybe I can do something to help them.”
Either way, it’s a puzzle I’m still turning over in my head, and one I’m glad to have never beaten.
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