/games/ - Games

Doesn't really have much to do with SJWs. Game journos have to pump out articles fast, so of course they want games to be easy. Plus, teens have better reflexes than adults. I think the shift to games becoming easier compared to the 90s is understandable. You want broad appeal, so you make it easy to get to the game's canon ending and put in some easter eggs and extra challenges for the more intense gamers.

I'm a busy adult these days and I simply don't have to time to waste on games that refuse to challenge me. If your game is trivial to beat, it sucks!

>>2767
Life is already hard enough. I want my games to provide a bit of pushback but ultimately not be hard enough to be frustrating. I just want the easy feeling of achievement and the dopamine hit.

>>2767
I have always been a big fan of the idea of customizable difficulty in games. Let the player decide how hard they want the game to be.

I think the main beef wasn't about "hard vs. easy" games, but about dishonest characterizations of "difficulty" by people who are too retarded to play games.

This in turn branched off from an earlier argument between film-school-reject "indy" pretentious twats attempting to eliminate not just difficulty, but interactive mechanics themselves, from games, and turn the entire medium into movies for people too incompetent to break into Hollywood, or even its retarded twin in the incestuous Sundance-oid Dogme 95 festival circuit.

Nowadays, the malign influence of both the SJWs and their "indy gaymur" hacks have subsided alongside the waning relevance of its promotional vector, vidya "journalism" itself.

A greater threat today, both to valid game design, and to gaming as a medium, is the rise of LPs. People passively watching streamers instead of actually playing games, and games designed to be watched rather than played.

The problem with some difficult games is that they pad the difficulty with a lot of tedium, so that the player gets an inflated sense of achievement after finally getting over the obstacle simply because he's finally free of that tedium.

Then you have difficult games that completely remove the tedium with instant reload times that immediately throw you again at the obstacle. Like precision platformers for example.

Someone who's main hobby is playing games won't be frustrated by the first ones. But if you don't find games important and just want a pure challenge and nothing more then you'll quickly get too frustrated by the boring repetitive parts to continue.

>>3883
You imbeciles are the worst. Not every design should be expected to be able to have components switched out at your leisure.

I like games being challenging, however I absolutely hate the new advent of "good difficulty is when you have to memorize each and every pattern of the encounter". Its sad that the Soulslike series got infected with this mentality. While I didn't play Bloodborne, DS3 deffinetly showed clear signs of this, with quite a few bosses being too fast to actually fight without the need to batter your head against a brick wall trying to muscle memory each of their abilities. At that point I don't think there is any real fun challange. Its no longer about your reactive quick thinking, but about your predictive capabilities you naturally gain by bashing your head against the wall. And it only got worse. DS3 at least had easy mode - the shield, summons, easy big damage parries and exploits. But Sekiro is just a malicious joke in comparison. With none of these easier options, from a certain point all bosses become brick walls. I guess I am just a normie sjw cuck, for I have decided to never finish Sekiro. I quit at the Monke Guardian after I had realized that much like the last hard fight I had in the game (the archer dragon dude in the castle), there won't be any fun in this, just a slog of me dying over and over, seeing the health of the boss get lower each time, getting tilted and quiting for a bit, only to return and hit my head on the wall more. So fuck Sekiro and fuck predictive difficulty.

>>4429
Slowdown functions are a necessity if you want to enjoy your shmups and kaizo games past 40 grandpa

>>4446
Scrolling shooter fan here who's beaten games including Gradius III, slowdown is the shittiest mechanic ever introduced in the genre and should be eliminated whenever possible.

>>4440
>Its no longer about your reactive quick thinking, but about your predictive capabilities you naturally gain by bashing your head against the wall.
That's why I didn't enjoy Hollow Knight despite finishing the game. Almost every boss past the first ones require you to automatically react to their attack signals, going through the same few actions-reactions dozens of times until they're finally dead. So you just repeat the boss fight until you can do the whole fight without thinking. It's not hard, it's tedious.
Semi-boss enemies were way more fun because you could invent different choreographies to defeat them. And they weren't placed in big empty rooms so you had to think about platforming as well, these fights were more dynamic and always slightly different. If they simply replaced every boss with a "colosseum of fools" type of challenge the game would already be way more fun. Of course they could have just designed more intelligent bosses.
The game was also filled with a lot of other tedious fat like having to traverse again and again through hordes of trivial enemies and repetitive levels which varied mostly only in terms of different aesthetics (with some excellent exceptions like the lowest claustrophobic and labyrinthine level).
IMO the game is so loved because of the polish and sheer mass of everything, so many areas, enemies, bosses, etc. It required a lot of work but this variety is mostly superficial when it comes to actual gameplay, which becomes quickly repetitive.

I don't think there's a single right answer. Different games can and should have different difficulties.

>>3892
>3rd pic
Who?!

If you want an easy game play an easy game. Some games are meant to present challenges for players to overcome, they aren't just interactive movies that every pretentious VIDEO GAMES ARE ART faggot wants them to be.

>>2767
I feel that games should have scalable difficulty since the entire point of a game is to be fun to as many people as possible.

>>4466
In come cases the fun comes from being able to beat the challenge that is the same for everybody, sharing the same challenge and experience. Especially if the game has a cult status.

On the other hand difficulty settings can be useful in increasing the replayability of the game, but only if the game is fun enough to begin with.

In reality almost all video games are just throwaway complete-once time killers, especially corridor AAA games. There's very few games that are fun because of the gameplay itself (e.g. polished controls or interesting systems with emergent gameplay) and not simply because of the pleasure of finally being free from playing it - which is why watching other people play instead is so popular. The draw of games that are just one single corridor is in their story and aesthetics, not the actual game itself. Story and aesthetics are rewards for putting up with tedious gameplay. So it's completely understandable that people prefer watching others do the boring stuff for them.

>the wank over difficulty is a bit pretentious at times
You mean at all times. Who cares how people play their vidya?

>>4539
People who don't want the market flooded with edutainmnent-tier garbage, presumably.

>>4539
Remember the whole controversy around Sekiro's difficulty? Some wokoid, fragile game journo couldn't beat the final boss so he used Cheat Engine to SLOW DOWN THE GAME SPEED so he could win. He admitted as much in the "review" and tried to justify it. The fallout was pretty hilarious. Now, I'm usually in favor of people playing how they like, but this was a so-called "game journalist" cheating because he literally sucked too hard. I like multiple difficulties in games for this reason: while it's more work to implement, you can actually please everyone if you do a good job.

>>4539
I think there's exceptions, especially complex sims, strategy games, and the like. but for the most part if a person can't handle a game on the standard difficulty level they shouldn't even bother playing because they're not engaging with it in any meaningful way.

>>4603
I think something also needs to be said about over-hard games, I'm talking battlefield 3 hard, no warning of enemies, quick ttk, that shit, because it exists and shouldn't be praised for being that hard, I'm not saying sekiro is too hard (never played it) but I think we should consider the other side of the problem

>>4604
>battlefield 3 hard
I find it "hard" to play the cancerous festering pustules still masquerading as Battlefield games.

>>4541
Nobody is forcing you to play them.

>muh markets
Kinda funny to see leftoids care so much about that.

>>4591
>Some wokoid, fragile game journo
Stopped reading there. /v/ermin really care about what "video game journalists" (lol) have to say, huh?

>>4603
>they're not engaging with it in any meaningful way
Most games released in the past two decades aren't all about gameplay, for better or for worse.

>>4624
It's not about being forced to play, it's about there being nothing to play.