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Post by The Great Klaid on Oct 14, 2014 18:40:48 GMT -5
I completely forgot about Shining Force, but it's a pretty easy game. I've soloed the second one. So it didn't quite work.
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Post by elektrolurch on Oct 15, 2014 5:28:47 GMT -5
Isn't this what a lot of western developers with their RPGs do to make them more popular? make the rules easier to get into to get more people to play and enjoy it?see morrowind/oblivion vs skyrim, see system shock 2 vs bioshock........sometimes it has an effect on overall difficulty,sometimes not. Uh and one mroe thought. Look at how easy some of the hardest arcade/nes aera games are. which are highly accesible. Now look on more modern platformers, which can be way more complicated, but are usually way easier. Look at castlevania I vs symphony of the night.......
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Post by Exhuminator on Oct 15, 2014 8:52:32 GMT -5
This is a topic I find of great interest. I am often drawn to hard games, especially hard JRPGs and SRPGs. Beating difficult games in those genres gives me a sense of personal accomplishment. For example, I bought NAtURAL DOCtRINE recently solely because it's supposed to be brutal. It might destroy me! But I'll enjoy the legit challenge it offers win or lose.
My most recent challenge is in playing Etrian Odyssey: Untold on Expert Mode. I have found Expert Mode to be very challenging indeed. I spent five hours trying to beat the last boss of the third stratum last night, and I finally did beat it. That felt great to do legitimately. But what I have read other people do with this game is knock the difficulty down to Normal or Picnic, whenever they reached a brickwall boss in Expert like I did. I've also seen on the GameFAQs forum where Expert players would knock the difficulty down to Picnic and grind for hours, then put it back on Expert and keep going. Well that's pretty disingenuous to factually playing this game on Expert, and is tantamount to cheating as far as I'm concerned. I really, really wish Atlus had made the choice of difficulty unchangeable once you chose it and started your game in Etrian Odyssey: Untold. To me personally, that is much more fair to those who actually push through Untold on Expert Mode the whole way.
You might wonder why this even matters to me. Well it matters to me with this game, because Untold has something called Guild Cards with medals on them for various achievements by your team. People love to show of their Guild Cards via QR codes on /v/ and /r/gaming. Well one of those medals is for beating the Yggdrasil Core on Expert Mode. Now, I think the game should not give that medal to anyone who ever changed the difficulty back down to Normal or Picnic, while playing through the game on Expert to even get that far. But it still does give them the medal. I just don't think that's quite right.
I am okay with hard games having easy modes for accessibility. It makes sense from a sales perspective. I just want those hard games to recognize and reward the merit of the players who play them on the actual hard difficulty. And not give out the same Gold Stars with no regard thereof. Disregard I'm probably an elitist douche.
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Post by thoothan on Oct 15, 2014 9:19:46 GMT -5
If you make games easy you ruin the core of HARDcore gaming and also destabilize the youth
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Post by Deleted on Oct 15, 2014 14:19:27 GMT -5
Kirby's Epic Yarn is the easiest game on earth, but that doesn't make it bad. The aesthetic might not be for everyone, but I found it absolutely charming. At any rate, the main problem I have with people who honestly believe that "only the HARDCORE need apply" is that it implies that they carry that kind of mindset over into other aspects of their lives.
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Post by masamvne on Oct 16, 2014 12:48:44 GMT -5
I don't think the accessibility of a game necessarily has any influence over how difficult it is, or vice versa. Tetris is simple to understand but brutal on faster speeds.
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Post by vetus on Oct 16, 2014 13:16:26 GMT -5
I have seen many people complaining about Alien Soldier's difficulty for being too hard but that's because they didn't have the patience to learn its kinda unusual mechanism. Once you learn it with just a little practise (it's a damn run and gun game, not a complicated strategy/rpg) you will realise that its difficulty is overrated. Also it is more accessible that most run and gun games of its era like Contra and Guardian Heroes for these reasons: 1) The stages are incredible short (don't worry, it has many stages) 2) When you start the game, you can resume from the last stage you have reached 3) Unlimited continues in Easy Mode. Putting aside the continues, the difficulty is pretty much the same with Hard Mode. 4) Trial-and-error gameplay
Speaking for Gunstar Heroes, am I the only one who find it harder than Alien Soldier? Expecially with Green boss, I hate this guy!
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Post by r0ck3rz on Oct 16, 2014 14:15:18 GMT -5
Gunstar Heroes practically has a cheat mode with combining 2 homing weapons.
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Post by Exhuminator on Oct 16, 2014 20:38:31 GMT -5
I have seen many people complaining about Alien Soldier's difficulty You could also pause the game and adjust the game speed with a sliding scale. Unless you were playing it on Superhard.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 16, 2014 21:53:00 GMT -5
The biggest reason people whine about Alien Soldier being hard and inaccessible is that it has probably the most complex control scheme ever devised for the standard 3-button Mega Drive pad. I think it would have been a lot more comfortable with 6-button support.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 16, 2014 23:10:32 GMT -5
Because no other medium denies people from seeing the ending of something in the same way games do? Paintings don't become blank canvases if you do not have the skill to reproduce them; books don't shut themselves if you don't understand every word; nor do movies turn themselves off if you don't understand the intricacies of the plot. If games are to be treated as art and as a vehicle for storytelling, they need to be held to the same standards as other mediums and allow people to evaluate the entire product regardless of skill. It's also just plain good game design! A game of average difficulty implies that most people can beat it, not an elite few. If normal is too hard, that's where easy modes and cheats come into play. Why SHOULD games in general be treated as "art and a vehicle for storytelling?" So dweebs can justify to their parents the amount of time they spent playing them? The problem is that you apparently want EVERY GENRE of game to conform to these standards, when it's really only suited to the narrative adventure and traditional JRPG genres. I am ALL FOR lower difficulty in these types of games, because their inherent lack of mechanical design ensures that higher difficulty only leads to frustration instead of satisfaction. But in an action platformer, a RTS, or a fighting game, whatever story exists should be treated as window dressing for the action and made clearly distinct from it. I have always favored the Metal Gear Solid series' approach to handling narrative, where story details and dialogue are consistently relayed in non-interactive cutscenes and codec sequences, so as to not intrude on the game design. Also, if your level of skill is low, then you're not properly qualified to evaluate a game that requires one to demonstrate it! Sure, you can soak up the audio, visuals and story by cheesing through a single-player campaign on the lowest difficulty, but you will have nothing informative to say about how it actually plays, and your experience will likely have been far less exciting and fulfilling than it could have been. In a game focused on competition with no worthwhile single-player component at all, such as Quake III Arena, it's even more hopeless for the player with low skills and no desire to improve them. Leave the task of judging and ranking video games on their relative merits to the experts! Who said I WANTED games to be as popular as they are right now? Didn't Hollywood go to shit when the studios started aggressively homing in on mass international markets and the widest appeal possible, with movies that try to be all things to all people? And I don't know what games you've been playing, but bottomless pits and spikes are still very much with us. The demonizing of forced restarts and limited lives in the public eye was unfortunate, because these mechanics are very effective at imbuing actions with tangible consequences. One credit clearing a well designed arcade game, knowing that messing up enough times will kick you back to square one again, can make you feel like a god damned action hero. And there's few moments in gaming more intense than pressing the eject button on prompt in Steel Battalion before your save file is permanently deleted (failing enough missions while surviving will still render the game incompletable). If you don't have the time or inclination to persevere with such games, speak for yourself and find a more passive experience. Don't whine and complain when the game refuses to bow to your expectations. Absolutely, positively incorrect, and I shouldn't even need to explain why. After the 8-bit era, it was the norm and not the exception for sequels to be easier. I don't know how you pulled this one out of your ass. The three classic concessions you mentioned were okay because they weren't nearly so exploitable (being either well hidden, scarce, or carrying a risk), and weren't presented so blatantly as alternatives to practice and improvement for struggling players. I don't really care. All of those things exist outside of the game, and you won't find them unless you go specifically looking for them. It's anyone's prerogative to use them if they want, and I've certainly done so many times before. It's when the game itself openly offers up ways to break its design and bypass challenge that I call foul.
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Post by Snarboo on Oct 16, 2014 23:14:36 GMT -5
So you're basically a big grouch that doesn't want others touching his electronic toys? News to me! Edit:I'll humor you one last time since you keep making the exact same arguments over and over again: there's more to games than raw skill. Anyone who has played games long enough will tell you this, but you and a few other people seem to insist that games should require great feats of skill to defeat, and any concessions made to make games accessible to people of lower skill levels are bad. Even if they're optional concessions. You yourself admitted there's a general trend towards making games easier and more accessible, which is quite frankly a good thing. A game with a high skill ceiling isn't better than one without. Also it's fair to evaluate a game as an unskilled person, just as it's fair to evaluate anything. That doesn't make it more informed necessarily, but that doesn't make it unfair.
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Post by Weasel on Oct 16, 2014 23:30:57 GMT -5
This thread suddenly got a lot more populated! Why? because I moved in a crapton of posts from the Sonic Boom thread on the same topic. Same advice as before: keep it cool or there will be consequences. (You know who you are.)
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Post by The Great Klaid on Oct 16, 2014 23:40:47 GMT -5
Yep, that's why Mega Man 7 and 8 and and Bass are all considered by and far the easiest of the series.
But really, I've been hoping you'd have a point. Something to say about all of this. But I think Snarboo's right. You seem to just be mad that other people get to be gamers. I see nothing wrong with it personally. It means we get more games. You're not much of a gamer if you think that's not a good thing. And you know what? You don't have to play AAA stuff. My library is almost entirely niche stuff. I don't like the trend mainstream games have gone either.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 17, 2014 0:02:37 GMT -5
there's more to games than raw skill. Anyone who has played games long enough will tell you this, but you and a few other people seem to insist that games should require great feats of skill to defeat, and any concessions made to make games accessible to people of lower skill levels are bad. No, there's a proper place for "interactive experiences" like Silent Hill 2 and Chrono Trigger that don't demand a lot of the player, as long as they can make a strong enough case for valuing their narrative and audiovisual elements over their mechanics. It's okay for these sorts of games to be made accessible, but their design philosophy shouldn't be allowed to bleed over into more skill-oriented genres. By what trick of logic is continually dumbing down something over time a good thing? We've seen way, way too many classic series ruined over the years by half-hearted attempts to pander to a wider mass-market audience who previously had no interest in said games. This trend you mention arose mostly because of financial imperatives, not creative impulses. If anything, the existence of competitive Pokemon play proves that almost any game can have a high skill ceiling, if its players are dedicated and meticulous enough. It doesn't make it good, though. Having a high skill floor is more important, namely the amount of complexity that players are expected to handle at a game's base level of play. Somehow I don't think you'd agree that it's fair for a kindergartener with a leg-powered Fisher-Price car to evaluate the features of a Tesla Model S.
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