Hardly Harder – An Amateur Analysis of Difficulty in Video Games
This is a new format for Retro Ramblings, but, conveniently, Retro Ramblings implies. . .fucking rambling. Buckle up buttercup, we've got some takes hot off the presses.
I think I’ve finally been able to use good words to describe a feeling I’ve had.
For as long as I can remember, people have been saying something along the lines of “Games are getting too easy, they're commoditizing gaming, lowest common denominator, etc.”. And y'all, yes, that's actually happening. But, like, that alone isn't actually. . .a problem? For me anyway. I'm all for accessibility. I mean, a11y ,yes, but also just “People getting to experience games”. These games are often stories and stories are meant to be shared. Someone being “not good enough” to finish a story is elitist. Period. And, also, sometimes that is okay.
But really, the thing that has bothered me about this isn't that things are getting easier. It's that the kind of hard that they are is often contrived. Mundane.
Many (probably most) older games have levels of difficulty that arise from the limitations of the environment they were created in: Technological limitations making it difficult to communicate lots of information that the player needs to Git Gud, digital game design infancy, etc. However and fortunately, game designers and developers knew this. And, since they knew this, they could apply game design to that problem and make that hardness part of the game instead of being an arbitrary slider a user can tweak. And so, difficulty in games had a certain. . .texture to them.
These days. . .well, the texture is mud. Clean, no sticks or anything. . .you know the kind of mud. A it's that mud that isn't. . .dirty, except that it's literally dirt. Ya know? Every “hard mode” in pretty much every (TRIPLE A, but this also applies to indies, sorry folks) is just “We added more health to the enemies and/or made them hit harder, so you just have to do the same thing but faster than you would otherwise.” And no, that's not the entire phenomenon. I'm having trouble describing this part, and it's the point of this post. Well, other than stalling the studying I should be doing for a certification test tomorrow.
I want to give an example. Pokemon
Back In My Day™, if you wanted a great mon, you had to work at it. You had to grind out IVs, find out what the IVs even were, and then once you'd hatched seventeen thousand ghastly eggs you had to then EV train that ghastly. You threw away three whole shinies in your pursuit of the perfect ghastly. It was toil. It sucked. It was not good game design, not by itself. Now, that toil was fine, if all you wanted to do was get a nice team of your favorite pokemon. You only had to do that process six times. But what if you wanted a team of, like, actually good pokemon? Dude you had to spend. . .weeks. Weeks. Just hatching eggs.
Then, lo, HeartGold and SoulSilver dropped. Gen 4 was already very solid in terms of grinding out pokemon. The IV problem was not solved, but at least the EV training part was effable. (If you don't know what those are, they're specific kinds of stats that you get in different ways. It's not important to the point. IVs take much longer to get right because they are. . .were practically impossible to monitor in the base game)
They'd eliminated a big part of the toil without changing the texture of the difficulty. It was still difficult to make a good team, but it wasn't nearly as difficult, and almost all the difficulty was something you applied skill to, not time. It took you time to design and develop your team, but as a whole, not mon-by-mon. However, HGSS fixed the other half of the equation. They made it so that even IVs can easily be locked in during the creation of single mons, and that was such a powerful pattern that people would train their pokemon in HGSS and then transfer over to D/P/Pt in order to play competitively.
It was now. . .EASY to make a competitive team. You had to know what you were doing, or follow a guide (I have feelings about how folks view these kinds of skills. . .that's another post), but the point was you could apply yourself and end up with better results.
. . .But you could also just play the fucking game. And you'd never know that these deep systems are there for more competitive players. You would never stumble upon a perfectly competitive team. You had to work for the extra stuff, but not for the game or the story. This lead to an AMAZING competitive scene (in my opinion, anyway). Put a very crass way, the FNGs were all just playing the game and the battle-hardened veterans were having the time of their lives building the teams they didn't have the time to do just a single game generation earlier. Now, of course, this was also basically the start of “real” competitive pokemon, in the sense that anyone in the world could play with anyone else in the world and thus we actually opened up a “real” competitive scene that wasn't restricted to Rich White Dudes Who Had Time And Money To Travel To Events (My gods, that describes SO MANY COMPETITIVE GAMES it's not even funny. . .).
After that, I kind of lost the thread a little. I bought X and Y but, like, I was a young adult who was fairly new to the workforce at the time. I didn't have time for pokemon, X or Y, and I didn't even have a 3DS, so I could only play it on my then-girlfriend's 3DS.
So I didn't play new pokemon games for many years. It wasn't until I finally got a switch and then Sword and Shield that I got back into pokemon and WOW. I loved Shield. Like, it was great, fun game, it was such a huge difference from the last games I played that it was shocking.
But I played through it. And I beat it. Fast. Easily. Of course I beat it fast and easily, I thought to myself, I used to pretend I was good at pokemon! But like. . .something didn't feel right.
Now I am not going to sit here and review a pokemon game that came out several years ago now. However, I will say: ALL of the toil is gone. All of it.
If you want a kickass team of perfect IV mons to compete with the best of the best, you didn't have to do anything. You could change IVs, EVs, get basically any pokemon you wanted almost anywhere, you were getting mystery gifts and mystery trades and. . .just, all of the toil was gone.
That toil that is now gone is that texture I was talking about from HGSS. The toil in HGSS had a purpose. It was a skill gate, and one which was completely fair. It wasn't a time gate anymore, like in previous generations. There was no monetary gate; you just needed the game, and the DS was never expensive (listen, comparatively. I recognize we're talking about the first-worldiest of first world problems here, you don't need to point that out to me. This parenthetical should go without saying but for some reason it never does!).
This is one example, but it's one that's near and dear to my heart. It seems like the only way game companies can add difficulty these days, what with ever ballooning scope and shorter-than-ever time crunches, is either by making the damned health bar bigger, or giving up, making the game online- and multiplayer-only, and relying on the fact that some people will be better than others to provide said others with a challenge. Looking at you. . .all FPS games published in the last twenty years. (nah, there's been some recent innovation. . .almost all of it changing how multiplayer works)
It's lazy. It's irresponsible; frankly, it is likely a pretty big factor behind predatory practices like loot boxes that artificially inflate play time. And, worst of all, it's just not good game design. I know game designers today are better than game designers from when I was a kid, and that's largely because a lot of the game designers of games I played as a kid are still practicing today. They've defnitely learned a thing or two.
Anyway. ..so that's the Ted Talk. I don't think this is news to anyone. It's just a framing I don't think I've heard anyone talk about. IANAGD (Game Developer), so take all that with a grain of salt.
And don't worry, I'll get back to the game-specific ramblings soon.
As always, if you wanna yell at me for my opinions, you're welcome to do so on Mastodon.
