Computer games used to be easy. When I was a kid with my Spectrum I’d think nothing of throwing myself against the same problem again and again until I learnt how to get past and encounter the next, probably more obscure, problem. I learnt how to get and what to do with a babelfish. I found out that using the pulley with the rubber chicken was rather useful. I’d worked out the foolproof method for docking in Elite 100% of the time! I’d even be able to get more than a few levels into R-Type.
This week R-Type was released on XBox Live, and I no longer have the seemingly god-like abilities that I had when I was a kid. It has a new infinite-life mode, and boy do I need it. The classic retro mode with limited lives means I cannot clear stage one. I suck.
I think we’re all afraid of hard games nowadays. Nobody wants them, it’s always got to be pandering to the wimpish no-frustration crowd. Of which I am one.
I can’t stand it when a game doesn’t have regular auto-saves. I could explore a whole planet in Mass Effect and then die, which meant I had to explore it again. That bugged me. RPGs are awful for that, how many hours of my life have I lost to replaying content because I forgot to save?
One of my favourite early XBox 360 games is Dead Rising, the game that is not inspired by a certain zombie film set in a shopping mall. Honest. The thing with that game is that you get a single save, and you can only do it from certain places so that you can’t just throw down a backup save before a nasty fight in case you die, you need to be careful all the time. I honestly think that it adds to the game and if you had a more traditional save mechanism the game would suck. I suspect most people don’t agree.
This week Burnout Paradise finally got a restart option for races you fail. I never understood why people wanted that. Early on in the game if you fail an event you’d always be very near to another event to try of the same type, later on in the game when you’d completed one or two of them it was just an incentive to try harder and not waste time. There’s something about the harder games that I actually like it seems.
Fable 2 is an interesting game in that it’s just about impossible to die. If you get killed in a fight you lose some XP and that’s all, you’ll respawn very quickly and can finish it. I loved the game, but the lack of failure really detracted from the experience for me. The thing is I can see exactly why they did it and I think it was the right choice. The story was the most important thing, and a hardcore player or the most casual of casuals had to be able to see it. It was possible to just mash your way through the combat and win, or to express yourself through combining your three attacks if you want and by doing so the game didn’t punish you for not being that great, or by taking the easy route with the attacks. On the other hand you rewarded yourself by performing well in combat, and when you die you think that you really shouldn’t have and so the death penalty was provided by your own standards.
People don’t want games to be hard, but if they’re easy then people will play the easy path through because that’s just human nature. Mashing Fable 2 AOE fire spells to win all fights or autosaving before every fight in other games is unavoidable, people will do it if they can, and if they can’t you’ll just hear the complaints from your players because they want to be able to do that.
This saddens me in a way, if games have an easy path then very few people will ever take the hard path and I know full well that I won’t. Now should I go back to slogging through R-Type, or should I play something that doesn’t punish me for failure?
The days of hardcore difficulty games are dead if you want to sell to the masses I think, our best best is for games to have ultra-hard modes that use Trophies and Achievements to encourage players to try.
Then again, I think I’d rather have fun every time I play a game rather than frustration. The problem is that I know I’m weak and will go for the easy difficulty the moment things get a little tough.
posted @ Friday, February 06, 2009 11:57 PM