A disturbing trend (Games are supposed to be hard)

It may sound right to do things regardless of popularity and what not but the reality will sneak in if you decline every single compromise.

i have only 1 eye and about 65% of normal eyesight with him also my reflexes and reaction speed is not all that great due to the eyes problem and i can tell u that the game is ok and is not all that hard...im doing solo lvl 64 maps with a lvl 65 char with negative rez and dont die..died at a lvl 61 just last night thogh:)) but its all part of the fun.

The "negative attitude" displayed here by some people is the results of years of built up frustration that these people have at games just handing every single thing to you on a silver platter and then holding your hand while you enjoy it.

Games used to be a point of pride for gamers. If you could finish Super Contra you were a god among gamers, similarly if you knew how to 100% clear castles in Wolf3d. Baldur's Gate was a game that I failed at for YEARS before I got a clear understanding of the 2ed ruleset but even that was a point of pride when I could solo the entire game with a Bard while my friends couldn't finish it with a party.

Games used to be hard to the point where they forced self discipline and improvement. It was never enough to just grind more gear or get more levels, if you didn't personally improve then you'd never get any better.

A good example of this is Chess, you get the best "gear" in the game right from the start, there's as many strategies to win at that game as there are people playing it, but guess what? Most of those strategies just do not work. The people that truly like the game and want to play it, learn how to improve themselves and their strategy to the point where they have a working one.

That's what I miss the most in modern games. There's no need to improve, there's no need to think and there's no need to get better, it can all be solved by better gear or more items or just straight up liner thinking. Games should be hard, and if you don't think so then you're in luck because there's an entire market out there catering to your needs already.

POE is taking the right approach to correct this. Good items aren't enough to carry you through content and that's exactly how it should be.

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awin123 wrote:

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Games used to be a point of pride for gamers. If you could finish Super Contra you were a god among gamers

A good example of this is Chess...

There is a big difference here. In Chess, you can always get to the endgame, even if you lose. If a game requires uber skills to see a sizable chunk of it's content, it's fail design IMO.

I own over a thousand PC games, and about a third of them I've never finished. Some were due to lack of interest, but others I just plain got stuck. Sometimes as soon as a quarter of the way into it.

That means that all the work those devs, artists, writers did beyond the stuck point is content I will never see. Games need difficulty settings so that players/purchasers get to experience the whole game.

PoE doesn't really have difficulty settings, so the bar cannot be set too high. I think the devs of this game have largely achieved this (except for a couple of spots for certain classes).

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TheSwampDog wrote:

There is a big difference here. In Chess, you can always get to the endgame, even if you lose. If a game requires uber skills to see a sizable chunk of it's content, it's fail design IMO.

I own over a thousand PC games, and about a third of them I've never finished. Some were due to lack of interest, but others I just plain got stuck. Sometimes as soon as a quarter of the way into it.

That means that all the work those devs, artists, writers did beyond the stuck point is content I will never see. Games need difficulty settings so that players/purchasers get to experience the whole game.

PoE doesn't really have difficulty settings, so the bar cannot be set too high. I think the devs of this game have largely achieved this (except for a couple of spots for certain classes).

Trying to pass off personal opinion as fact doesn't make it fact. Just because you think that a game design is bad if it requires a high skill cap doesn't make it bad game design. In fact it makes it very good design if the intention was to make a game with a high skill cap.

Personal inability to finish games is a personal thing. There's plenty of games that I've given up on because they were too easy, a recent example is Mass Effect 3, the fact that I bought the game and couldn't finish it for whatever personal reason is my fault not the fault of the game developers. The game had no technical faults stopping me from finish it, I just chose not to invest time in it anymore.

Games don't NEED anything, least of all a difficulty selector, plenty of old games worked fine without one and so have plenty of modern games, World of Warcraft didn't have a difficulty selector and that got it plenty of subscribers. Then they decided to dumb down content for the masses and ended up with a game that has more active bot farmers than players. If the devs choose to include a difficulty selector, great, but I don't see where you get the idea that games NEED one.

The bar can be set wherever the devs choose to set it and that's their right to do as game devs since it's their game. The lack of a difficult selector doesn't obligate them to make the game easy, and sincerely hope they don't.

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TheSwampDog wrote:

PoE doesn't really have difficulty settings, so the bar cannot be set too high. I think the devs of this game have largely achieved this (except for a couple of spots for certain classes).

I assume you are neglecting the difficulty playthroughs on purpose here heh.

Most ARPGs are setup exactly to let you experience the content first, then ramp up the difficulty on subsequent playthroughs, although typically the power gap tends to widen as players get more and more powerful.

On the topic of 'needing' this or that. No games need anything in particular, depending entirely on what the goal of the developer is. There have been many advances in game design over the past 30 years, some of which are good, some are bad.

I think that difficulty selection is a good thing. More people can enjoy the product to its fullest extent, without really harming anyone else in the process. There is no downside to that... everybody wins here.

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TheSwampDog wrote:

... If a game requires uber skills to see a sizable chunk of it's content, it's fail design IMO.

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awin123 wrote:

Trying to pass off personal opinion as fact doesn't make it fact.

Please note that IMO means In My Opinion, not It's A Fact. That'd probably be IAF. :)

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zeto wrote:

I think that difficulty selection is a good thing. More people can enjoy the product to its fullest extent, without really harming anyone else in the process. There is no downside to that... everybody wins here.

I agree. And you'll notice that I said above that I think the difficulty of this game is just fine.

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zeto wrote:

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TheSwampDog wrote:

PoE doesn't really have difficulty settings, so the bar cannot be set too high. I think the devs of this game have largely achieved this (except for a couple of spots for certain classes).

I assume you are neglecting the difficulty playthroughs on purpose here heh.

Quite reasonably. It's not a difficulty setting if you don't set it.

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GusTheCrocodile wrote:

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zeto wrote:

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TheSwampDog wrote:

PoE doesn't really have difficulty settings, so the bar cannot be set too high. I think the devs of this game have largely achieved this (except for a couple of spots for certain classes).

I assume you are neglecting the difficulty playthroughs on purpose here heh.

Quite reasonably. It's not a difficulty setting if you don't set it.

I've never understood why these games don't let you skip difficulties.

My only beef with that is... if you take a new character to difficulty 2, how hard is it to just make it to town?

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zeto wrote:

I've never understood why these games don't let you skip difficulties.

My only beef with that is... if you take a new character to difficulty 2, how hard is it to just make it to town?

I made it to town just fine in Torchlight 2 on Veteran yesterday evening. It was harder than on Normal I guess, but that's the point.