Ch4mpTW wrote: »

out51d3r wrote: »

You are complaining about artificial difficulty, yet you are telling them to be more like Castlevania, Megaman, Contra, and Ghouls and Ghosts? In most of those games, you miss a jump, and you are straight up dead. And you are given a limited amount of lives and continues. Those games were FULL of artificial difficulty. The reason why: they were developed by people who started out on arcade games, where their goal was to squeeze players for more quarters.

I'm not saying these games were bad. I've finished all of them in my youth, and I still go back to the Castlevania series once in a while. Saying that they aren't artificially difficult is pretty crazy though.

While true to a certain extent, those games really pushed you as a player via: Puzzle solving, reflexes, and overall mechanics comprehension in a fun sense. There was no RNG-oriented deaths just about. If you died, it was because you performed poorly. Unlike the numerous RNG deaths in ESO that exist. Not to mention that the mechanics weren't 'hidden', and took days to figure out. It was fluid.

When you play a video game, you expect to be able to use your skills as a gamer to beat whatever challenges the game throws at you. If the challenges require a lot of skill, the game is hard to win. If it doesn't require much skill, it should be an easy game. However, some games that should be relatively easy are actually quite hard. It could be due to shoddy programming, a Game-Breaking Bug, poor implementation of gameplay elements or time constraints, or the developers threw in something which makes the game harder, but which has nothing to do with the player's or AI's skills. This is fake difficulty.

There are five kinds of fake difficulty, in addition to The Computer Is a Cheating ***, a sub-category of this:

• Bad technical aspects make it difficult. Making a difficult jump is a real difficulty. Making that same difficult jump under an overly complicated control scheme, horrible jumping mechanics, or an abrupt mid-air change of camera angle - and therefore the orientation of your controls - is fake difficulty.
• The outcome is not reasonably determined by the player's actions. Unlocking a door by solving a color puzzle is real difficulty. Unlocking it by pressing a button until you get the right number is not.
• Denial of information critical to progress. A reasonable game may require the player to use information, clues, or logic to proceed. Withholding relevant information such that the player cannot possibly win without a guide, walkthrough or trial and error is fake difficulty. Also includes hidden Unstable Equilibrium (e.g. a later level is much harder if you do badly at an early level, and you're not informed of this ahead of time). In a 2D game with no camera control, hiding important details behind foreground elements or Behind the Black counts as fake difficulty if your character should be able to see them.
• The outcome of the game is influenced by decisions that were uninformed at the time and cannot be undone. (Unless the game is heavily story-based and unforeseen consequences of actions undertaken with incomplete information are legitimate plot elements, or the game offers some way of mitigating or eliminating those consequences.) A game that offers a Joke Character and is clear about the character's weakness has real difficulty. A game that disguises a joke character as a real one has fake difficulty.
• The game requires the player to use skills or knowledge that are either incorrect or have nothing to do with the genre. A football game that requires you to describe the position that Jerry Rice played for a power-up is real difficulty. A football game that requires you to describe the position that Jerry Rice played to get a powerup, and assumes the answer is "Quarterback", or one that forces you to do multi-variable calculus in order to train your starting lineup is fake difficulty, not to mention just plain silly. (Even if that last one would arguably be kind of cool.)

It is important to note that just because a gameplay feature is annoying and frustrating does not make it fake difficulty. For example, placing a large number of invincible minor minions between the player and the Plot Coupon is extremely annoying, but they can be avoided by skilled movement - thus, the difficulty is real.

Note also that fake difficulty is not inherently bad. If used subtly, it can provide a satisfying challenge in cases where the AI might be lacking. However, it is obviously preferable for the AI to provide a challenge by playing well than by getting special advantages from the programmer. Moreover, some games (notably Platform Hells and Retroclones) get the majority of their comedy/nostalgia from Fake Difficulty and is much of the appeal of them - Dungeons & Dragons' most popular module is packed to the brim with Fake Difficulty and attempts to reduce it have caused complaining from the fanbase.

Fake Difficulty was prevalent in many older games, when developers were still learning about how to make fair challenges. When people realized that sometimes, the game was hard for all the wrong reasons, they decided to make it more of a fair challenge. The unfortunate side effect is that newer games seem easier in comparison merely because they're a fairer challenge. There are plenty of other reasons for this (such as players being aware of some persistent forms of Fake Difficulty and making sure to avoid them) but that's another article entirely. It still does exist today, mind you.

Fake or Artificial difficulty is sometimes used to refer to the raising of enemy stats without improving their AI or giving them new abilities. However, raising enemy stats may force the player to devise new strategies or execute their inputs with less errors. Trial and error and reattempting sections of a game are a natural part of most games, and only excessive or ridiculous examples of trial and error should be considered "fake". Also, difficulty is a measurable statistic that can be categorized into different player skills. Thus the term "fake" difficulty is a matter of opinion which can change from player to player, depending on which forms of difficulty they like or dislike.

• Vast range of player stats.
  Armor can range at max level from 9,000 to 50,000; weapon damage can vary from 1,300 to 5,000; health recovery from 200 to 3,000; max magicka from 9,000 to 70,000; etc... For such a diverse set of statistics players can achieve, designing a piece of content towards one build or combination of stats will make that content too easy for some builds and too hard or impossible for others.
• Hybrid combat system.
  ESO's combat system is a hybrid of MMO-style action bar, tab target combat and aRPG free movement, free aim combat. There is the action bar, (semi-)global cooldowns, defined targeting (single-target, area-of-effect, up to 2, ...) and heavy influence of stats from stereotypical MMO combat and the free movement, (semi-)free aim and primary/secondary setup of action games. One style of combat is heavily reliant on stats while the other is almost independent of them. If an encounter is made tougher by increasing stats, it does not mesh with the action combat elements -- fighting more actively/physically provides no benefit or is even detrimental compared to standing and burning; if an encounter is made tougher by requiring better reflexes, it does not mesh with the MMO combat elements -- time based cooldowns cap player action speed where aRPGs use animation based cooldowns.

AuldWolf wrote: »

...Sigh. I am worried for them. If they had their heads screwed on straight, they'd be looking at bosses that use clever tactics instead of just testing the player's endurance, adding more variety to the game (jumping puzzles, actual puzzles like The Secret World's, minigames like lockpicking, et cetera), appealing more to the roleplayers and casuals that make up 95~ per cent of their community, and so on. They seem to be doing the opposite of that, currently, which is the mistake CO made. CO is now a ghost town....I love ESO, but I think they're heading in wrong directions, too. I wouldn't voice my concerns if I didn't love this game.