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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   2509 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 6, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Sekiro and Demon Souls are considered the most difficult sword/adventure games. What are some of the most difficult games in other genres: puzzles, RPGs, survival?

It's also easy to find games which can be set to extremely high difficulty, but the difficulty is always purely artificial, because it doesn't rely on making the computer-controlled enemies better at the game or making the scenario more complex, it simply makes the enemies stronger (impossibly so, given the ostensible rules and the narrative) while handicapping the player's units.

I never really got this complaint. Depending on how the game mechanics are set up, it may not be reasonable for the AI to be 'improved', and it's not even always the case that good AI makes the game harder. In addition, many games presume or establish asymmetry between the player and the enemy to begin with. In most FPS titles, for example, the player is usually vastly outnumbered by the enemy, but enemies are individually weaker and usually only have a single gun to work with.

Or creating an RPG character that's a dog's breakfast of classes and features that could not possibly make sense narratively, but allows for all sort of insane synergies that are possible because the makers of the game couldn't possibly have tested all the combinations of 8 races and 30 classes, each with a dozen different abilities. And characters like that are the only way to beat some of the "optional bosses" that no party that would be legal in a table-top game could ever hope to defeat.

I think stuff like this is fun, though. Isn't the point of high difficulty to force the player out of cookie-cutter builds and force them to explore the wider space of different options and combinations? Isn't that a form of 'mastery' too?

I never really got this complaint.

I don't mind loing to a strong chess engine, but I don't care to play a weak engine that is strong because it has two queens. The same is true for other strategy games. I want the computer to use the same options as the player not have a bigger economy/free troops etc that it mostly wastes. Also, many free resource games become gigantic slogs toward the end when the only sane option is pointing every resource toward the threat and the computer is sending an army that the player couldn't make in 20 turns every other turn. Not usually hard to beat, just quite full because you're beating the same army in similar ways to finish a game that was "over" some time ago.

Well, that's mostly the issue of asymmetric games pretending to be symmetric. In better designed games, the asymmetry is explicit and both the advantages and limitations of the AI are built around instead of the game pretending they don't exist.

And the second problem isn't really fundamentally caused by the asymmetry, it's caused by bad victory conditions. Plenty of strategy games become gigantic slogs by endgame when played in multiplayer as well. Which is why nearly all multiplayer matches in Starcraft or Civ end in forfeits.

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