I play games to be challenged, to use my brain. To use the tools the game provides me to overcome situations. But I don't consider 'failing and losing 2 hours of work' a challenge, that's just a stupid mechanic. I should be able to save anywhere when out of combat, but once I'm in combat, challenge me!I don't get the "hard but rewarding" part , i don't know what percentage of gamers are casual but i do know that many of them do not play for the challenge but just for fun . Hard but rewarding can mean that you get something extra and proceed to the next brutally hard level? this is not fun.
Specially in RPGs what excites me is to feel intrigued , either morally or gameplay wise , for example when my character is not good enough to progress in one area i am interested in level him up and go back to enjoy my extra powers.
Reloading is epic fail in my books , i don't mind start running , to tell the truth i am usually play characters that use unmanly tactics but being forced to do the impossible just makes me wanna play something else.
"Forced" thing brings me to another aspect of "hard games" : having to play the way game dictates eliminating options either by getting you inside a chock point or
presenting you with an "end boss" without any way around him.
For example in DAO where you meet the assassin guy , second time you play the game you know what is going to follow so as a rogue i thought using invisibility buff and make thing little easier…well i could not , the game forced me inside the trap and i did had to reload several times …in a period of 1 week.
I love long strategy planning and this is the reason why i play grand strategy games (Rome, Victoria, TW, EU , Galactic civ etc) sometimes i win sometimes i lose and this is fun and acceptable what isn't is having to face strange game settings like "bosses" on steroids , crazy number of enemies and very narrow paths of winning .
I saw videos of "Demon Souls" , like the one where you have to kill a guy 30 times bigger than you by hitting him with your needle like sword on the toes , i can understand that some people like this but to me apart from laughable as an image it looks like you are role playing a microbe trying to kill a medical lab. O.K. let's say you kill the guy and get the "sword of wtfpwnage" what's next , oh you have to face an even tougher opponent ! how this is an accomplishment ?
apologies for the long post
Gamasutra - Is Hard The New Good?
- Thread starter Dhruin
- Start date
BillSeurer
Eternal Supreme Dictator
being hard wouldn't be so bad if it was consistent. Unfortunately many games aren't that way. You can be playing along just fine and then hit one spot where the difficulty spikes and you just cannot proceed. In badly designed games that can stop you cold and you have to give up. Fortunately most recent games allow you to adjust the difficulty on the fly or have another way around whatever so if you hit a roadblock encounter you can scale things back, get past it, and then go on.