Video Games, Difficulty, and Battered Controller Syndrome

I feel uniquely qualified to soapbox about video game difficulty. I've beaten most of the Call of Duty games on Veteran difficulty (which isn't all that bad), I've beaten every Halo on Legendary difficulty. Way back in the day I even beat all of T.T.'s ghost times in Diddy Kong Racing, which was a real pain in the asshole.

Here's the bottom line: gamers want to be challenged. I don't want to play a game that's so easy I breeze through it in an afternoon. Here's the but. BUT, I don't want to play even one more game that substitutes "difficulty" with "horse shit".


horse shit

noun
1. As it pertains to video game difficulty, horse shit refers to the developer's tendency to opt for cheap ersatz solutions, such as reducing your health bar, increasing the amount of damage done by enemies, removing necessities such as ammunition and health, etc.

In almost every video game, cranking up the difficulty just means making the game stupid. Right now I'm playing through Dead Space, probably one of my favorite survival horror games ever. I'm going for the last achievement, which is to beat the game on Impossible difficulty. First off, Dead Space takes away your equipment on a new run through on Impossible. Second, they give you less ammunition, ratchet up the enemies' health and double their damage. But really, the enemy is behaving exactly the same whether you're playing on the easiest or the most difficult setting. And that's the problem.

Playing through Dead Space on the easiest or the most difficult setting renders almost the exact same experience. There's no extra missions or bosses or weapons. The exact same enemies appear in the exact same place. Only on the hardest difficulty, they're stupidly powered up. Which, in my opinion, amounts to sheer laziness.

Video game AI has come a long way since the early days. But it hasn't come far enough to allow for games like Dead Space or Call of Duty or what have you to really provide an adjustable difficulty. So, instead, game developers subject their fans to frustrating conditions, little better than nonchalant sadism. Problem solved.

While we wait for gaming AI to catch up to the rest of the field, what can we do for a solution? I think there are some positive examples out there. The one game that comes to mind is StarFox 64. The cool thing about StarFox 64 was that depending on what you did in a certain mission, you could unlock new paths to completing the game, some which were more difficult than the original, vanilla way.

I still remember having mild panic attacks on the lava planet level. The point is that Starfox had a fairly unique method of providing a new experience for more skilled players, without making enemies more powerful or making you suck more.

Imagine a game like Dead Space, where playing on a different difficulty made the game entirely different. So, if you play on easy, you play as character A. Normal, character B. Hard, character C. Now imagine that to fully experience the game, you have to play as all three. Their plots could intersect at points, rewarding the player with character and plot insights otherwise unavailable. Nothing I'm suggesting is out of the question either.

Dead Space has 12 levels (or so?). Rather than make you play through the same levels over and over, doing the same shit, why not have 4 levels in sets of three. Meaning that on easy you have 4 levels, then you've beaten the easy game. 4 levels for Normal and 4 levels for Hard. Then game developers would actually reward you for multiple playthroughs, rather than punish you with stupid, lazy difficulty outs.

-K