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On January 19 2012 02:16 Shockk wrote:Show nested quote +On January 19 2012 02:06 Neo.NEt wrote:
Yeah I'm having a problem with RPGs being so easy these days. I'm playing Skyrim on the hardest difficulty and it's pretty much impossible to die unless you find a dragon priest in which case it's impossible to even take one hit without getting owned. The D3 beta (which is only a beta but still) is so easy it's a joke (and not even fun). Difficulty up plz. "Yeah RPGs are too easy except for the fights I can't manage but avoid so my argument is still valid."Yeah, right.
Yeah, because a proper difficulty curve should consist of a piss easy game with a few optional, easily avoidable encounters that requires hours of theorycrafting, grinding and huge amounts of luck to pull off.
I agree with that other guy. I miss games that are moderately challenging from beginning to end. Challenge shouldn't come from mostly hidden encounters that are so frustrating you're going to pull your hair out.
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Seriously. Used to be that gamers wanted to play games. Now gamers want to zone out for a couple hours and step away from their computer with their ego stroked. God forbid mandatory content asks for a little effort from the player.
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Not really sure why this thread has devolved into a circlejerk over RPG difficulty. Most of what's thrown around on the last pages is pure hyperbole, and many folks seem to have forgotten how little older games' difficulty had to do with them actually being hard, but with the controls being much less refined and gamers having several years (or decades!) less worth of gaming experience under their belt.
But hey, go ahead and enjoy agreeing with each other's nostalgia-tainted, horribly exaggerated opinions if that makes you feel better. Us other people are having fun with (challenging) current RPGs in the meantime.
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Multiplayer with fire wall mage was hilarious. Good times all arou... i mean, for just myself. ^^
I agree with the OP, but only because it was my first time playing a game like that, so Diablo was my first game of that genre and thus was overflowing with awesome things i'd never seen before.
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On January 19 2012 04:23 Shockk wrote:
Not really sure why this thread has devolved into a circlejerk over RPG difficulty. Most of what's thrown around on the last pages is pure hyperbole, and many folks seem to have forgotten how little older games' difficulty had to do with them actually being hard, but with the controls being much less refined and gamers having several years (or decades!) less worth of gaming experience under their belt.
But hey, go ahead and enjoy agreeing with each other's nostalgia-tainted, horribly exaggerated opinions if that makes you feel better. Us other people are having fun with (challenging) current RPGs in the meantime.
There was no circle jerk. It was just one post on that previous page talking about difficulty before your one-liner no-content response. In fact, the thread started with difficulty discussions on page 1 and was moving slowly away from it before that post and your response.
It's not exaggeration to say that current games are made to be much easier than games as recently as the mid-2000s. All the challenge in today's mainstream games are relegated to optional sidequests that offer masochistic levels of difficulty. With few exceptions, the main storyline is designed to be extremely easy. All the challenging content are optional and can be easily avoided.
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On January 19 2012 05:07 andrewlt wrote:
It's not exaggeration to say that current games are made to be much easier than games as recently as the mid-2000s. All the challenge in today's mainstream games are relegated to optional sidequests that offer masochistic levels of difficulty. With few exceptions, the main storyline is designed to be extremely easy. All the challenging content are optional and can be easily avoided.
Because this applies to all games and is true for all genres and for all target audiences. Geez, you're really making it easy for me here; I was criticizing hyperbole and you're delivering yet another round.
Hint: Diablo 2 was easily as hard, if not more challenging in higher difficulties, than D1. Skyrim can be much more difficult (and not just so in dragon priest fights) than Oblivion or Morrowind. The Witcher's hard difficulty was so popular that the developers patched another, even harder mode due to community demand. Ultra-hard platformers like Super Meat Boy or I Wanna Be The Guy are racking up incredible sales (but we're deviating a bit from RPGs there).
On the other hand, even older, "challenging" games can be played with cookie-cutter builds and refined equipment/characters on higher difficulties without breaking a sweat or encountering challenges at all. A halfway decent party in BG2 will tear through the whole content at ease. A wizard, pretty much regardless of skills, will crush the whole of D1's content.
Challenge is what the players make it. The vast majority of players will find older games challenging not because they actually were harder (not saying some weren't), but because they had a harder time playing them. Due to inferior controls and a lot less metagaming than what's going on today. These days you're having guides, walkthroughs, tipps & tricks everywhere; gameplay videos months before a title is released and a wealth of experience with games (which tend to be pretty similar overall) to profit from. Think back a few years or decades and you probably had no clue what you were doing when you played D1/BG/Daggerfall for the first time, probably rolled crappy stats as well or picked the wrong skills, and voila, you had a challenge.
I'm not dismissing the trend that a lot of games are easy these days due to the shift in target audiences. This is true. Neither do I want to deny that there's a wealth of older, challenging titles. But saying that all older games are hard and all new games are easy - and this has been said quite a few times in this thread and elsewhere to - is nonsense and simply not true. For so many reasons.
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D3 does not need to be scary. I will be satisfied if it lets me play a hero character without being over the top. But when I see bullshit abilities like the monk that summons pillars I am not sure I will get that.
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I think careful difficulty scaling is something almost every game could improve upon. Edmund McMillen, one of the creators of Super Meat Boy, is a genius at this and it shows in his games. SMB in my opinion wasn't even that hard until Rapture, and I'm certainly no skilled platform gamer. But it was really noticeable how gradually and subtly the difficulty increased in Super Meat Boy and it made the game fun. Skyrim on the other hand was bad at this and it definitely had a bad impact on the game. For example, some mobs scale in Skyrim and some don't apparently. You faceroll some fort and then there's this one mob that hits like a truck and has five times more health for no frickin reason. Difficulty balance is a wreck in this game. Now Skyrim is supposed to be a very open RPG with a huge environment to RP in. For RP purposes, screw difficulty balance, nobody cares. But if you want to play Skyrim like a real game, it really falls short after a while.
So all in all, hardly any game has outstanding difficulty balance in my opinion. If one has it though, it really glues you to the game because you get reasonable and appropriate problems to solve.
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Well it's a trend to make games more accessible and easier because the majority of gamers doesn't appreciate the things you're mentioning and it's not the minority that brings in the cash.
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One million copies of Super Meat Boy sold beg to differ. Triple A titles get more accessible, that's true. However, I think it's important for indie developers to realize that proper difficulty balance is a great selling point that doesn't suck up huge amounts of money, and the more indie titles there are with great difficulty design, the bigger the pressure on triple As to deliver the same. That's my hope at least.
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>4 players
>All cast Chain Lightning over and over
>Last surviving player Resurrects everyone else and buys the mana potions
>Mana Shield all powerful
>Brain generates "fun"
Oh memories. 
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I remember being scared to the point of almost soiling myself when I had to face the Butcher in D1.
"Ahhhh FRESH MEAT!"
Diablo 1 was a great game, and I definitely agree with a lot of your points, it was a different breed for sure.
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EPT
