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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   2499 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?

If the game is so hard that Pun-Pun nonsense-jank is necessary to beat it, then it isn't encouraging people to explore a wider space of options. Everything converges on the one broken nonsense build, and "cookie-cutter" archetypical builds become, perversely, rarer. everyone is a GensaiWarlockPaladin

My typical self-imposed challenge in RPGs is to find a sub-system or strategy or archetype that I LIKE or isnt used by Power builds and make it work anyways.

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