Game Difficulty: hanging in the balance.

Game Difficulty: hanging in the balance.

I’m speaking to the masses, here.  Not the gurus or the ditzes.  To clarify, gurus are the guys who either own a handful of games and play or have played each one often and more than once.  Ditzes are the guys who get 25% through a game, and box it up to play a newer game, never resuming the first.

The masses are the majority, I think, who like to get a game and finish it at least once, but don’t master it, play it on every difficulty level, or write a FAQ on it.

Now that I’ve established my audience, I’d like to comment on the importance of default difficulty of a game, with some notes on cheat codes and glitches.

Aside: I saw a laptop commercial w/ Shaun White (snowboarder/skateboarder) and me mentions he uses it to go and get all the cheat codes for his games so he can beat them as fast as possible.  Keep that in mind when reading.

The masses, in general, buy a game, start it, beat it, and then move on to the next game if one worth playing is available (and these days, there is).  Very few people, I believe, start a game on a harder or easier difficulty than default (exceptions being having played the game before; for example playing the previous year’s Madden before).  Though more common, not many people, while traversing through a game, say “this is too easy/hard; I’m going to bump up/down the difficulty level.”  Most of us, when a game is difficult, enjoy the challenge of discovering how to beat it, and the reward in doing so is much sweeter.  Sadly, the masses (and significantly more so-the ditzes) have a relatively short attention span, such that if a game isn’t firing on all cylinders, it will see early retirement.  Approximately 80% of my game time goes toward Halo 2 on XBL, where the experience is diverse enough to remain entertaining (in other words, I’m not burnt out, and the 2o2p site had even renewed my vigor for the game because of the community).  I must confess that to this day I have never played all the way through the Campaign (of H2).  I played H1 Campaign with friends before I got my xbox and likely played every mission at some point, but H2 was out when I got my xbox, so while I got H1 with it, I haven’t played it more than maybe once.  Honestly, I couldn’t even tell you what level of the campaign I’m on in H2… The last thing I remember was I think rescuing marines from a ship and trying to get out.  Sad, I know.  For me, the story just didn’t grab me and make me want to not only see, but Cause, what happens next.  Further, given my 80% statistic, I play the Campaign so seldom that I don’t really recall what was going on when I last left, so it’s difficult to immerse myself in the world that is H2 Campaign.  With other games, it may not be the story that fails to draw attention, but other factors.  I hate games that give you the super-bad-mofo weapon/car/ability right when you’re 98% through the game.  If I’m going to get a bad mamma-jamma sword that glows blue and hurls demons at the bad guy, I want to use that thing!  Not the entire game, mind you, but enough such that at the game’s end, I’m not saying “would’ve been nice to have that a few levels back…”  This is where cheat codes and glitches make or break a game.  Codes can add or subtract to a game in terms of enjoyment, difficulty, and replay value to name a few.  Since very few of us play through the game a second time on a higher difficulty so we can see 2 minutes of extra cut scenes, it can be nice to use codes at times to throw in additional variety.  For example, in Final Fantasy 1 (NES), you could use a game genie to learn spells you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to learn, which is good; in Forza (xbox) there is a glitch (before you go online) to make as much money as you want; in Fable (which rocks) there is a glitch to duplicate keys that opens a chest containing the 3rd best weapon of the game (cool looking hammer).  For me, things like this do not break the game, but rather take out the “grind” aspect that may be tolerable at first, but quickly becomes monotonous and dull.  When I used to play Everquest… that game is the definition of “grind.”  On the plus side, you could always improve; you were never “capped” at a certain level of “bad-arseticity” where you just run around and own everything in your path.  However, the means to improve were ridiculously tedious.  Looking back, I ask who in their right mind would “camp” an area, killing the same respawning monsters over and over and over for hours on end, to see a bar slowly creep up and eventually give you a point to spend toward an ability that costs 9 points…  Insanity.

Circumventing “grinds” adds value to a game.  Yes, it shortens the game and makes it play differently than intended by the developers, but IT KEEPS THE GAMER’S ATTENTION, and in today’s market, Attention Retention is what sells games.  There are some games whose codes/glitches break the game, making it ridiculously easy such that the game is completed in record time, and the motivation for upping the difficulty is nil, since the initial experience was so easy that replay would be far to difficult or time consuming, by comparison.  That is why it is vitally important for developers to establish a healthy, balanced default difficulty, strictly control what cheats/glitches exist (easier said than done) and provide online patches to fix “game-breakers.”  (Like Halo did with pulling weapons/items through walls and other quirks), and lastly make the reward for completing the game on a higher difficulty worthwhile such that a gamer would want to give it another run through.  So many games have great potential but fall short due to these factors.  On the bright side though, it’s a competitive industry, technology is forever advancing, and achieving this perfect model is getting easier by the second.