Nintendo says NO! to Hard games!

[Dogg Thang]

I would have thought DMC3 was out of the reach of players without patience and good gaming skills. I almost gave up myself on the first level (and a couple of other places too). But I stuck with it and loved it. I would have said it was too hard for some people (definitely the Face Training crowd) but I'd be fine with that. There are easy games for other people just as I'll play an easier game rather than torment myself with something like G&G.

[Concept]

When we pay ?40 or whatever (I'm more arsed about the 12-36 months of wasted hype over cash, anyday) we want more than just 8hrs of a 'from start-to-finish' run-through of some rechurnable franchise cash-in.

Some of us aren't 7-9yr old gamers. We expect more. Simple as.

EDIT: Sorry mate, you mean the same people wanting both of those? Hmmm.. It's a tough one to think about for sure, although with the inclusion of fee-based DLC thesedays people are happy with gamerpoints as rewards over finishing stuff in under 2hrs on hard mode - 'Back in the day' you'd be rewarded with all new guns/characters/cars whatever... no no no (lolz) you need to pay for that now, son! (like in the other thread)

What always gets me is that I remember back to playing with Robocop figures as a kid - wasn't that film meant to be an 18 certificate? (I know it's an 18, just using the example ) You can play with the toys, but you can't watch the film! (wtf?)

I'm against short games myself, but I don't see how longevity really comes into it. You can have a rock solid four hour game which bears up to repeated playthroughs, just as you can have a 60 hour snooze-a-thon RPG where you barely have to press anything other than X. :P

So I really wasn't taking a stance on either side. It's just an observation that gamers want games to be hard, but at the same time, a lot of them call for more of an expanded market.

I don't agree with fee-based DLC (replacing length or people buying themselves out of being stuck) but that's a whole other messy thread. :P

[Concept]

This assumes that games have to be for everyone. They don't. If a game is a hard game, let it be hard, challenging and, with that, rewarding (those shooters y'all like, or Ghosts and Goblins). If it's easy, let it be easy, fun and, with that, rewarding (Lego Star Wars for example). If it's down the middle, great.

But I'd rather there were different games catering to different people rather than trying to be everything to everyone.

I agree on principle. In the post you quoted, I was referring to the mainstream heavy hitters as opposed to the niche market (i.e mentioning Prime). Probably should have clarified.

I don't think many hard games sell well compared to their peers which is precisely why they're either balanced to incorporate tuned difficulty levels, or there are no difficulty levels at all.

I think that's Nintendo's point in reference to the Wii. The casual market can't be brought in through the competitive qualities which drive narrower portions of the market, so they're probably going to focus on making more traditional games accessible to those areas.

I don't profess to be the world's greatest gamer and I don't want dumbing down but I've always preferred depth to difficulty. Of course you can have both, but if shove came to push in the meat of the big titles I'd prefer the former.

But then I'm not someone who plays games out of competition.

[Dogg Thang]

Yep, I'm the same. I wasn't once but I rarely have the patience for hard games these days. I want to just enjoy the experience. I think that's what games are for me now - an experience. Not something to be conquered through long and intense practice and trial and error.

[SUMIRE]

Isnt that what Easy, Medium and hard modes are for.

[Dogg Thang]

Yes but easy and hard modes have varying relevance depending on the game. It's very easy for someone to programme enemies that can take more hits in hard mode. That's fine in a shooter. But if it's an adventure game or one that involves exploration or puzzles, it's really a token thing to up the strength of the enemies. To truly make a 'hard mode' would require more than that.

Was it Silent Hill 3 that had difficulty levels for both combat and puzzles? That's a rare thing.

[Lyris]

But let's face it: the whole world is devolving to cater for the stupid and the slow ... car-crash reality TV, dumbed-down news and movies, pointlessly easy games and school exams ... whatever next?

Being good at Hard games does not make you smart - games can be intelligent without being difficult. In fact, I would argue that it's a bottom-of-the-barrel, dumb design mentality to assume that making a game hard automatically makes it good.

There was a survey done that suggested something like 80% of games don't get finished. That to me suggests that they're too difficult. Of course, unless a game really, really strives at its presentation, characterisation and story, then making it ridiculously easy will take all the fun away as well.

I'm not saying that Nintendo's recent output is exactly what I'd like, but give me a really fun game that I can finish without too much effort and look back on my experience playing fondly, rather than one where I have to memorise attack patterns and replay sections 50 times before getting bored and eBaying the thing.

[Dogg Thang]

There was a survey done that suggested something like 80% of games don't get finished. That to me suggests that they're too difficult.

It could be a whole bunch of things but I would attribute that more to games not being interesting enough.

[Lyris]

In fact, to add to my earlier post, if you want an example (IMO of course) about how the "Let's make it hard!" design mentality can really screw up a game, look at almost any of the Mega Man games (unless they've toned down the difficulty recently - they probably have).

Do you ever hear anyone rave about those games and say, "Wow, I loved Mega Man, it was SO difficult! I had to play the lead-up to the Web Spidus boss SIX times before I actually managed to defeat him! It got more and more fun with each repetition!"

When I hear people say good things about games, it's usually about the story, the visuals, or the general feel of the game - not how hard it is.

It could be a whole bunch of things but I would attribute that more to games not being interesting enough.

Agree with this also.

[MarioMark]

This just sounds like another one of Nintendo's "let's look after the new gamer" ideas. I hope they don't make Mario Galaxy piss easy.

Although I'm getting crap at games these days so I'm with MikeRox on this one . I also enjoyed StarFox as is wasn't rock hard like Zelda can be at times.

[Freddo]

well, there's hard and then theres just annoying, most games that are considered "hard" are really just piss poor design, badly placed checkpoints and unskipable cut-scenes will make me abandon a game way faster than just it being a bit tough.

[angelx]

I would have thought DMC3 was out of the reach of players without patience and good gaming skills. I almost gave up myself on the first level (and a couple of other places too). But I stuck with it and loved it. I would have said it was too hard for some people (definitely the Face Training crowd) but I'd be fine with that. There are easy games for other people just as I'll play an easier game rather than torment myself with something like G&G.

I gave up on DMC 3 not long after that flying snake thing, shooting that for half an hour till my arm ached was just masochistic, Ninja Gaiden I didnt get the hang of neither, I just found them frustrating. I play to have fun, not get frustrated.

[Strolls]

I find nothing more irritating than hitting a brick wall in a game, and finding it impossible to get any further.

Absolutely.

I'm not going to comment on other posts specifically here - lots of other people have said other things I could also easily reply to - but Mike has put it in a nutshell here. I couldn't have said it better myself - and I am one eloquent bastard.

I have so many games that I've brick-walled, and it really pisses me off. I can be really enjoying a game up to that point, and it seems stupid that one's pleasure in the game is curtailed just because of "one stupid boss" you can't get past.

A couple of examples:

XIII - I really loved this game, which I played on my Mac and before I really "got into" gaming. From the first video reviews I loved the cell-shading, and FPS are definitely my thing, anyway. I really enjoyed the stealth 'em up elements to creeping around the base - sure you could play the game by getting in the guards' faces & opening up on them, but that rarely got me very far so I loved the way you could take them out at a distance with the cross-bow, too. It was the cabin scene in which I got bogged down - way too many bad guys coming at you and a helicopter raking you with machine gun fire - the difficulty of the previous sections of the game simply don't prepare you for that. I think that a few weeks later I picked it up again and after a couple of days was able to get past this point, but by that stage I had already lost interest in the game. Compare the frustration of this with my satisfaction at completing Max Payne - which I played at around the same time; that just left me feeling really pumped and wanting to play more of the same.

Red Steel - I was one of those folks who really liked Red Steel. Now that I've got a bit more experience I can see that it is indeed flawed, but I don't feel Red Steel to be completely without merit. It plays like an FPS should play and I like the control scheme - I think that maybe better suits people without previous analogue-stick experience. For me, playing an FPS with the wiimote adds a feeling of interactivity, and I loved the feeling of targeting which Red Steel gave, holding your arm out and getting the cross-hairs right on the bad guy. I love the "bullet-time" slow-mo. Unfortunately I got brick-walled at a sword-fight about 50% through; I tried for a number of days to get past this but more than 30 or 40 minutes in a session was frustrating, so I started on a second game which I played when I actually wanted to enjoy myself. Within a couple of weeks I had forgotten about Red Steel and I haven't picked it up again since.

Metroid Prime - I wrote a really long post about 4 months ago on how much I loved this game. For a week or two I was playing it 4 or 6 hours most nights - I easily sunk 60 hours into Metroid Prime because if I got killed it was no hardship at all to start off at my last save point and take some pleasure through exploring again until I got back to that point. Then I got stuck on one of the elite pirate bosses and the fun has gone out of the game - I have to admit that it's been pretty close to that a couple of times before, but each time I get past a boss it's been wooo! I did it!, a rush of satisfaction and much pleasure at exploring the sections that it has unlocked. This time, however, I'm finding it hard to muster the enthusiasm to keep hacking away at this same section again and again until by sheer chance I fluke past it, and haven't tried to do so with Metroid Prime for at least 2 weeks, perhaps a month.

I think the thing that applies to all these examples is that I don't want to have to play the same damn section for hours, dozens of times, before I'm able to complete it. It's just wrong to leave a game as good as Metroid Prime uncompleted, yet somehow I can't summon up the energy to get my ass kicked by that elite pirate yet again.

I guess this is a good time to admit that I don't see myself as a "hard-core" gamer, however much time I spend on here. I feel that I'm much more of a movie fan and I can tolerate a rubbishy novel much more easily than I can a game which I don't get along with. I guess with a book that gets dull you know you can always plod through and you'll eventually get to the end of it - and it may well improve before the end of the novel. I'm much more forgiving of crap movies because throughout the duration I always want to know how the story turns out; somehow I can always sit back afterwards and find something redeeming about a movie - whether it's just the landscapes or that it's a different perspective about the world.

Although I'm enjoying the progressive story elements to GTA Vice City at the moment - and the free-form elements, of course - I don't tend to see games in the same way; they are something that you start, play and complete. I don't seem to tend to get involved in a games' story - I don't care about it in Metroid Prime, for instance, and I don't seem to "get it" when I read others discussion of the Metroid plots and how they're anticipating that in Corruption. I see most FPS as a something you progress through rather than a tale unfolding - for me, the cut-scenes in a game are just to tie the shooty sections together and give them context. In Resistance Fall Of Man I'm much more enthusiastic about the background and the alternate-world history than I am in Hale (or whatever his name is) personally.

Perhaps I'm more forgiving of novels & movies because the completion is done within a couple of hours or a couple of days, but a game that prevents me from completing it has failed its purpose. Well, except Tetris, that is. At the same time a game that's too easy to complete will also leave me cold - I find little memorable about CoD3, and feel slightly ripped off that I paid full price for a game which I was able to complete in only a dozen or so hours (although perhaps the fact that it ends without you personally overrunning Hitler's bunker is an element to this? The game ends halfway through the French campaign without you really having achieved much of a satisfying conclusion - perhaps this is why I get no feeling of completion from finishing that game?)

Clearly there is a very fine line here between "challenging" and "too difficult". I used to fly paragliders pretty seriously and there are some gliders I find outright scary, others I find too undemanding; even amongst the wide selection of wings that are generally pretty well-matched to me there are more or less subtle differences which I can pick out and say "I'd prefer this a little easier" or "I'd prefer it didn't do my job for me when that happens". Like everything in life it's one of those delicate balances and you can't please all the people all of the time. I'd prefer less bitching about "how games should be" and the continued suggestion that causal gaming is "pandering" to the masses. Just from reading the title of this thread I was anticipating comments of "games are too hard for grandma, boo hoo!" and "they're stitching up their hard-core fan base". I'm glad to see that there's more intelligent input than that here.

Stroller

[Ady]

It's a tough one (pardon the pun).

Personally, I always welcome challenging games. For me, part of the fun is rising to the challenge, learning the system and eventually beating the game. Some claim that harder games are a rip off in that they never get to see the much of what they paid good money for. I, on the other hand am more inclined to feel ripped off if a game I paid good money for can be beaten with minimal effort. That's not to say I'm one of these elitist snobs who insists on games being difficult and inaccessible to 'casual gamers', I just welcome a good challenge sometimes, that's all.

And with this in mind, it's not difficult to appreciate Miyamoto's dilema. Whether some wish to accept this or not, gaming has broadened and appeals to more people than ever before, and those within the industry looking to turn a profit (i.e. Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony et al) need to consider ways to make gaming appeal to new markets as well as existing ones, and that involves striking some kind of balance.

As for the disparity between expanding the market and enjoying hard games, I personally see no reason why accessible, massmarket games can't co-exist with more traditional, 'hardcore' fare. It doesn't have to be either/or.

[EvilBoris]

I remember reading an interview with the developer of Lego Star Wars
he said "Not everyone seeks to be punished by a game" which made perfect sense to me in the context of that game, that applies to lots of games.