PixlBit

Enough with the laziness already!

I’m not a particularly angry person. Oh sure, stuff gets me upset every now and again, but when it comes to games I don’t see the point in getting out-and-out angry over stuff. I mean these are games, right? Sometimes though, things just collide in such a way where my honest reaction is anger; and right now I’m there.

If there’s one thing that gets me upset it’s laziness, and I had a pretty obvious encounter with developer laziness in my recent playthrough of Darksiders as chronicled in Backloggers Anonymous. Since it was my second time through the game, I decided to chase an achievement and play on the hardest difficulty, called Apocalyptic. Want to guess what changed about the game?

Absolutely nothing.

I fought the same enemies using the same tactics with no discernable difference. If the enemies hit harder, the damage was mitigated by the fact that I had completed the Abyssal Armor set in my initial playthrough. If the enemies took a few more hits to dispatch, it wasn’t noticeable. Healing items didn't become scarce, less potent, or more expensive. The prices for upgrades didn't change, nor did the amount of currency I received for dispatching my enemies.  Apocalyptic difficulty certainly didn't live up to it's name. In fact, in my experience, the game didn't change in the slightest, and that sucks.

Darksiders did what many games do when it comes to difficult these days; they took the easy way out. Think about it, how many games throw your enemies an HP boost and call it “hard?” Even some of the games I champion for their brilliant contributions to the medium, like Bioshock are guilty of this, and it really pisses me off. It’s not fun, it’s lazy, and it made my experience feel like a waste of time.

What happened to difficulty settings? Going as far back as I can remember, higher difficulties were there to offer replay value in a game. Even before they became options, the earliest games I played, Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda, both greeted those who were victorious with altered second quests that raised the difficulty level in creative ways. Super Mario Brothers swapped easier enemies out for more difficult ones. Zelda’s changes were even more dramatic. Tougher enemies greeted the player earlier on in the game. Locations for shops, dungeons, and items were moved around, making them harder to find. The dungeons themselves were completely re-designed and sometimes contained invisible walls.

The first game I remember playing with an actual selectable difficulty, Mega Man 2, actually went so far as to change some of the enemies, in addition to an HP boost. This was in the '80s people! It’s been over 20 years and most games don’t even give us the common decency of at least changing enemy placement? Come on!

I’m no programmer, but I know it can be done with only a little effort. Most players aren’t looking for much - just something to motivate them. Lock some optional rooms off and make them available in hard mode only (Crimson Shroud did this). Give us some new enemy types; I’d even settle for a palette swap of already existing enemies that act differently and make me think more about my actions. Do something creative besides dangling achievements or trophies over our heads.

I hate to do it, but I can’t talk about this without mentioning the Looking Glass Thief games, which had one of the best difficulty systems I’ve ever seen. Before playing each mission, you selected what difficulty you wanted to play the mission on, and the objectives were completely different depending on the difficulty selected.

For example, here’s the objectives from mission 5 of Thief 2:

Normal

• Overhear the sheriff's conversation at midnight
• Steal at least 800 worth of loot
• Make a copy of the key and return the key to where you found it

Hard

• Overhear the sheriff's conversation at midnight
• Steal at least 1,000 worth of loot
• Make a copy of the key and return the key to where you found it
• Do not kill any innocent bystanders

Expert

• Overhear the sheriff's conversation at midnight
• Steal at least 1,200 worth of loot
• Make a copy of the key and return the key to where you found it
• Kill no one

The need to collect more loot and the added challenge of being less lethal in your approach, made for a more complex and challenging experience. More loot required meant you needed to go off the path leading to your objectives more often, which meant you would encounter more enemies and traps than before.

Let me emphasize this again: you play in the same world. The enemies weren’t even any more difficult, but the rules changed enough to keep the game interesting. I understand the need to save a buck or two, but you can at least be creative about it!

Here's another, more recent example. Fire Emblem Awakening is out now and is getting a lot of praise for its handling of this very subject. When starting a new game, the player is prompted to choose between normal, hard, and the aptly-named, lunatic difficulty level. You may expect this will cause the enemies to gain more HP and hit harder, but that's not the case. Instead, it makes every decision matter more by boosting both yours and your enemies attack strength. This means your enemies as well as your allies will die quicker, putting a higher emphasis on your tactical decisions. Lunatic difficulty often makes attacks a one hit kill, so you can imagine how much that changes how you approach the game.

Additionally, Fire Emblem Awakening will then prompt you for a second selection, classic or casual, which turns permanent death for you troops either on or off, and allows or denies you the ability to save during a battle. Again, this completely changes how you approach the game. Casual will pretty clearly remove most of the challenge from the game, allowing you to just experience it however you want, while permadeath makes you slow down and weigh every decision as failure now has dire consequences. These are all minor programming tweaks that make the user completely rethink how they play. It's just a matter of the designers thinking through what makes the game what it is, and bending the rules to force the players to re-evaluate their behavior. It's brilliant.  

A better difficulty setting may not have saved Darksiders from being the digital incarnation of mediocrity that it is. Developer laziness permeates far deeper than that alone, but it’s touches like this that separate the men from the boys when it comes to development. There are plenty of other people out there besides me that point to Thief as one of their all-time favorite games, and their excellent level design and creative approach to difficulty are one reason why. On the other side, I can’t think of anybody that would cite Darksiders as even being in their top 50, and THQ’s decision to allow Vigil to cut corners in ways like this hurt them big time.

Developers, next time you think about taking the easy way out and just buffing up the baddies for an added challenge, I hope you remember what happened to THQ. The people who play your games, your customers, require more than just the same old boring approach to things. If you create a middling title, it will sell like one and likely be forgotten in a year or two, but with a little effort and creativity, you can create a legendary franchise that fans will remember fondly even after a decade has passed.