Ian - Sweet/Mild/Bitter

Teehee, I’ve named this blog post after a game for which I don’t even own the console! I just think it’s a nice way of saying what needs to be said to gamers before they embark on their mission, how tough it’s going to be.

I want to talk about difficulty. It’s never really been an issue up til now, but If you’re aware what ”Ikaruga” is then you’ll know that it’s bloody difficult to complete in one sitting, without revisiting the frontend menu at least 1(000,000) times. Before my 360 decided to show me the Red Ring of Death, I was playing it on Xbox Live Arcade, and even with 15 Ikarugas (3 x 5 Life Credits), I could still only get past the third boss (just). There are 5 levels, which I have seen via Replay, and I know for a fact that it doesn’t get easier herein. I play on easy.

Luckily for Ikaruga, the fact that it’s such enthralling experience means that I continue coming back to it, but there are other games that I’m slightly more reluctant to play if and when either I or the developer decides to be slightly masochistic. When you buy a game, you have no idea of the difficulty (usually), so the developer can decide to be as nice or as nasty to it’s customers as it wants, and it’s finding that perfect balance between challenge and enjoyment which i’m sure must get on at least a few people’s tits.

Call of Duty 4 is an immensely brilliant game both in Single and Multiplayer modes. With Multiplayer, the game is only as hard as the opponents you face, and the single player has 4 seperate difficulties, for those who are adept and those who are shit. I’m not sure that it’s possible to state the brilliance of this game any more, but it providing such a buffet of difficulty to choose from is the ideal. People vary in skill and attention span, and if you want to get people saying good things about it to their friends, you’ve got to make sure that it’s possible to finish the game without murdering somebody with a blunt instrument (usually a controller).

I was so pleased to insert the Rainbow Six Vegas 2 disc into my 360 to be greeted to the choice of Casual difficulty, because I can’t remember how much energy I put into flipping out when I died in the first Vegas. Rolling out for a Terrorist Hunt for the first time, I was quietly confident I’d make shit happen, so I was scuttling around, popping fools in the face and whatnot, and then out of nowhere, BAM!, Guy came running out with a shotgun and killed me instantly. Mission Failed. The first 5 kills meant nothing, because I died once and didn’t come back, just like in real life.

Is difficulty just something that gets ignored in a design brief for games? Did Ubisoft specifically decide that they hated FPS fans that much, so they deliberately made it rock solid on every difficulty? Conversely, is there any reason as to why PGR4 was such a walkover to complete (just get a decent machine and don’t screw up and you can win)? Can difficulty be altered by just taking away half of the AI’s IQ? Why else would R6V2 be so unreasonably difficult on Casual?

Rant Over, I’ll sum up just by saying that I by no means like an easy game. PGR4 was a fun experience while it lasted, but it was easy enough for me to breeze through with no trouble at all. What I suggest here is that I don’t think that people consider how difficult they want the game to be before they release it. I know people who haven’t bought R6V2 because of the experience they’ve had with R6V1, so if they made it so that your charachter could withstand a few more bullets before popping their clogs, would that make it more fun, or too easy?

~ by mallowman87 on April 14, 2008.