Difficulty - a wimp out

[hallsofvallhalla]

Something I have noticed since the moment I started playing games is the usage of difficulty to cover up design flaws or lack of content. For instance, making a game extremely hard to move on to the next level because there are too few levels, or making spell progression very hard because of too few spells or making an area small because the rule system of that area is not balanced.

I see this over and over and it drives me nuts. It is a game killer and to me the weakest way to cover up flaws or lack of content. Some of the worst games I remember as a kid all have these issues. Back to the Future for NES is a game I will never forget. I shot my NES with a 16 gauge over that game. No joke. Was so POORLY designed and back then you paid all your money for a game. $50 was a lot to come by for a young kid and buying it over something that could have been good and entertaining was a final straw.

I am seeing the same with FTL. Very fun game but lack of content has caused the designers to make it extremely difficult. Final Fantasy 8 was another example. They could not properly build AI for the last main boss so they gave her 10,000,000 hp. Settlers of Catan fudges the dice rolls in the PC's favor to add difficulty. (Many PC board games do that).

[Mardonis]

Wow, I just read about that game on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_th ... ideo_game). I read somewhere (not from that link, but somewhere in the past no pun intended) that most of the games that come from moveies are not really that good and only make them for the money. I imagine there are some games from movies that are good but for the moment I can't think of any that i looked at that didn't make me change my mind in saying "hey I think I'll give this one a try". Therefore I havent bought any games that come from movies yet.

[hallsofvallhalla]

Hehe I have never read that wiki but the Reception part is dead on. Was the worst game ever and one of my worst enemies. I cannot believe LJN made it I loved Royal Rumble for SNES

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWF_Royal_Rumble

[Jackolantern]

I read somewhere (not from that link, but somewhere in the past no pun intended) that most of the games that come from moveies are not really that good and only make them for the money.

You don't need to cite any articles or anything for that haha! That is a fact, and it is pretty well known that movie games almost universally stink. That is mostly because the movie producers won't reach out to a game development studio until fairly late in production because they don't want the info on the movie leaking out. But the problem is that, as we know, a good game can take as long or longer to make than a movie. So these studios are given a date set in stone that the entire game must be completed by. But the studios aren't complete victims here. They know that the game is going to sell based on the movie, and only for a month or two. So reviews don't really even matter because most of the copies that will be sold are sold on opening weekend, probably before the reviews even come out (obviously they don't send out reviewers copies before release day lol).

As a side note, what is largely considered the worst game of all time, E.T. on the Atari 2600, was obviously a movie game. In the decades following its 1982 release, the gaming world has actually become sympathetic to the developer of it, Howard Scott Warshaw, since he was only given 5 weeks to write the entire game from scratch in assembly before its Christmas release (again, staggeringly short development times showing up again to ruin another movie game). He has said he had high hopes to make a truly innovative game, and was not happy with the results and even told his superiors. But all they saw were those dollar signs (E.T. was the hottest movie license in the world at that time, and Atari got the exclusive deal). Long story short, most (literally most) people who bought it actually returned it to the company, and Atari ended up burying millions of copies of the game in a New Mexico desert. Wow! Even movies based on great games spawned terrible movie games! Take for example, Street Fighter: The Movie on PS1 and Saturn. How hard is this?! Just make a regular SF2 game, but make up new character sprites to look like the actors, and introduce a couple of the non-SF2 characters! Capcom had already made about 8 versions of SF by that point, and they still dropped the ball hard on this one.

There are of course a couple of stand-outs, such as Chronicles of Riddick on the Xbox, which is quite a great game even though it came out basically with the movie and must have had a similar time constraint. Go figure, but it goes to show it is possible. But lightning very rarely strikes like that.

And do keep in mind the curse of the "movie game" does not count for games that are simply in a film franchise IP. Good examples of these include many of the Star Wars games. The ones that actually launched with movies were typically terrible, but there are some great ones outside of the official movies, such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Lord of the Rings is about the same way, with the official movie tie-in games stinking (with a one or two exceptions), but many of the non-movie games being quite good, like Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-Earth 2.

[Callan S.]

I thought FTL would come up in the post eventually!

I haven't played FTL, but it's a matter of the priority of the game, not just automatically a wimp out. Try a hard seduko - not much content there - a wimp out! Well no. In that, difficulty comes first.

Maybe all the cute graphics of FTL (graphics which the gamer community peer pressures as a requirement in games (while games like nethack tend to resist that peer pressure)) give a false impression that maybe it's about content - and by content, perhaps something like reading through a story.

Given the reference to roguelikes, I'd suspect the games priority is difficulty. Difficulty isn't covering up a lack of content - difficulty IS the content! Mostly gamble difficulty, for FTL.

And much as I've never finished nethack and from other accounts I've heard, it's dang hard to finish FTL.

Could difficulty be used to stretch out a game which is actually supposed to be about content/some kind of prewritten story? I'd agree that's possible.

[Verahta]

what is FTL?

[hallsofvallhalla]

Faster than Light

http://www.ftlgame.com/