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Also its literally the premise of the game. like, ethereals and Sectopods exist on day one. The aliens are throwing escalating challenges at you in order to unlock psionic potential, they're not collecting resources and running down a tech tree to crush you. The game is deliberately an asymmetrical test for the player.
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Jul 13, 2015 02:46
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Strobe posted:Why would you even bother playing a game if it's not challenging, and doubly so if it starts off challenging and then just sorta stops once you actually get good at it? Progression should be adding complexity, options, and new situations to overcome, not reducing the challenge to pitiful baby levels. If I want the game to be challenging, I can set the difficulty accordingly. Making the game easier is a welcome reward for playing well. If the game stops being fun because it isn't actively challenging, that's a flaw of the game's design. A neverending treadmill of increasing difficulty is not fun and by design will escalate until you stop doing well, at which point it begins to settle to an equilibrium where you're only scraping by. quote:I don't know why you seem to be so adverse to accepting this as a common pitfall in game design. The game is fun up until its no longer challenging at which point you just wish it would hurry up and get on with it so you can get your end game cutscene. I don't see it as a common pitfall in game design. I like to learn a game, do well, and be rewarded for it. If the game succumbs to tedium simply because I'm doing well, then in my opinion it wasn't a fun game to begin with. By definition, the game is going to keep shoving harder problems down your throat no matter what you do. Rubber banding does not mean "you are always challenged." Nonstop challenge is not fun and is a cover for "as much bullshit as you're willing to put up with." quote:It is ok to lose, just not 20 or 30 hours in before your realize its not salvageable. Or maybe you are just one of those Ninja Gaiden masochists Then that's a flaw of game design that you wait 20 or 30 hours before you realize it's not salvageable. In a game with adaptive difficulty again I ask: what reason is there to play well even if I'm capable of doing so? The game is only going to get harder until I'm not doing well, so I have no reason to do well in the first place.
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Jul 13, 2015 02:48
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Have you honestly never played a game with adaptive difficulty? Doing well isn't "punished", the difficulty ramps up a bit to keep you entertained. The whole purpose of playing games in the first place. Very few people actually enjoy a game that's too easy. If it gets too hard difficulty goes down again.
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Jul 13, 2015 02:56
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Dynamic difficulty seems to inevitably lead to extremes and gamey strategies. In the Homeworld games you were encouraged to retire most of your fleet at the end of each mission because the enemy ship count was scaled by your own fleet at the start of a mission, and the final missions of those games were notoriously difficult to people who didn't know it. The optimal way to play Final Fantasy 8 is to level up your characters as little as possible because enemy stats were scaled to your own level and you could boost your power in other ways, and being overleveled was actually a detriment. Mario Kart players feel safer in second place, not first place, for obvious reasons if you have ever played a MK game since 64. For all the talk of game design I've yet to see a game actually implement it in a way where we have an exception to the general rule of games succeeding despite having dynamic difficulty.
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Jul 13, 2015 02:57
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Suspicious posted:Have you honestly never played a game with adaptive difficulty? Doing well isn't "punished", the difficulty ramps up a bit to keep you entertained. The whole purpose of playing games in the first place. Very few people actually enjoy a game that's too easy. If it gets too hard difficulty goes down again. I've played a couple of games with adaptive difficulty, yeah, and in my opinion difficulty is not entertainment. Some challenge, yes, but if I want to play a genuinely hard game I would like to have that as an option I can choose when I wish, not something forced on me. The assumption of adaptive difficulty is that everyone enjoys whatever level of difficulty relative to player skill you decide the game should have.
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Jul 13, 2015 02:59
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Cythereal posted:In a game with adaptive difficulty again I ask: what reason is there to play well even if I'm capable of doing so? The game is only going to get harder until I'm not doing well, so I have no reason to do well in the first place. Playing a game is not a rational economic exchange though. Anyways, theres the concept of 'fine tuning', where you slowly increase difficulty either up to a defined ceiling, or slowly enough where player prowess still triumphs, its just not a complete cakewalk and boring grind (see the later half of Long War). Also, from a modding perspective, there arent a lot of tools to try and balance difficulty on the fly in XCOM. The alien response matrix (threat and resources) was hacked in and the only other variable is the research day, which is just the game day variable with a bunch of minor bonuses and a few maluses hacked on. Thats it. Three variables. Threat and resources determine the month to month mission profile (and resources is another 'if you're behind, fall further behind, if you're ahead, face a lesser threat' mechanic) and research day determines alien upgrades (and, as mentioned, snowballs against a losing player). I'm trying to work with what exists by suggesting maybe a few sign flips to change the snowball mechanic into an autobalancer of a sort. Zore posted:Also its literally the premise of the game. Also this.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:02
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Suspicious posted:Have you honestly never played a game with adaptive difficulty? Doing well isn't "punished", the difficulty ramps up a bit to keep you entertained. The whole purpose of playing games in the first place. Very few people actually enjoy a game that's too easy. If it gets too hard difficulty goes down again. It's entertaining for a game to start out hard and become easier as you learn the mechanics and build up your team too.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:05
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Not a Step posted:Playing a game is not a rational economic exchange though. Anyways, theres the concept of 'fine tuning', where you slowly increase difficulty either up to a defined ceiling, or slowly enough where player prowess still triumphs, its just not a complete cakewalk and boring grind (see the later half of Long War). Playing a game certainly can be a rational economic exchange. Again: why do well if there's no reward for it? No one arguing for adaptive difficulty has given a satisfactory answer to that question. Again, the fundamental assumption behind adaptive difficulty is that everyone will enjoy whatever level of difficulty relative to player skill that you decide the game should have. Personally? I like the feeling of power I get from doing well at a game. I like to be rewarded for learning how to play a game well, going from running screaming in the other direction from a sectopod backed up by heavy floaters and an ethereal to smiling calmly as I take the formation apart piece by piece.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:07
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MrBims posted:Dynamic difficulty seems to inevitably lead to extremes and gamey strategies. In the Homeworld games you were encouraged to retire most of your fleet at the end of each mission because the enemy ship count was scaled by your own fleet at the start of a mission, and the final missions of those games were notoriously difficult to people who didn't know it. The optimal way to play Final Fantasy 8 is to level up your characters as little as possible because enemy stats were scaled to your own level and you could boost your power in other ways, and being overleveled was actually a detriment. Mario Kart players feel safer in second place, not first place, for obvious reasons if you have ever played a MK game since 64. I didn't game Homeworld and enjoyed the poo poo out of it. The later game epic fights between fleets of Ion Corvettes and an enemy capital fleet in every mission was fun for me, because I didn't play through a tactical spaceships in space game to not fly some spaceships in space. I do take the point though, and think balancing is an art thats a lot harder than it looks. On the other hand though, there comes a point where it'd be easier and faster to open the dev console than to jump through all the hoops necessary to game the system, and ultimately the dev console isn't any worse. Cythereal posted:Playing a game certainly can be a rational economic exchange. Again: why do well if there's no reward for it? No one arguing for adaptive difficulty has given a satisfactory answer to that question. You play the game because the reward is more interesting puzzles and better challenge. Thats why *I* play games. I like to solve the puzzle presented by every turn in XCOM, and its why I personally dislike how much RNG Long War shoved into the game. I like to manage risk, not throw the dice and hope for the best. If you play the game to murder stomp some aliens, play on Normal, shoot hapless aliens and have fun. No one is saying thats bad wrong fun. What I'm saying is that I found the later half of my last Long War campaign a profoundly boring grind to the end and I wish the game had some way to step it up, like shifting from Brutal to Impossible (while engaging Dynamic War) after the base assault. The only way to do that with the mod as presented is to either let the aliens run a muck or send skyrangers full of rookies to their deaths to bump up alien research. Nix Panicus fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Jul 13, 2015 |
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Jul 13, 2015 03:08
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MrBims posted:Dynamic difficulty seems to inevitably lead to extremes and gamey strategies. In the Homeworld games you were encouraged to retire most of your fleet at the end of each mission because the enemy ship count was scaled by your own fleet at the start of a mission, and the final missions of those games were notoriously difficult to people who didn't know it. The optimal way to play Final Fantasy 8 is to level up your characters as little as possible because enemy stats were scaled to your own level and you could boost your power in other ways, and being overleveled was actually a detriment. Mario Kart players feel safer in second place, not first place, for obvious reasons if you have ever played a MK game since 64. One Finger Death Punch. The goal of the game is to punch dudes in a fast and awesome manner. Each level has a base speed; if you crushed the level before you'll play with bonus speed until you die. Left 4 Dead. Rather than tracking players against a single metric and calling it a day, the director takes a bunch of poo poo into account to determine if you're just "coasting in second place." The game actively spawns additional health items when you need them, so you can limp forward without building up a stockpile to feel secure. Cythereal posted:Playing a game certainly can be a rational economic exchange. Again: why do well if there's no reward for it? No one arguing for adaptive difficulty has given a satisfactory answer to that question. Honest questions for the sake of the discussion. Are you aware that many people receive intrinsic satisfaction from doing well in a task independent of the reward? Are you aware that such self motivated behavior is consistently indicative of greater satisfaction than reward oriented behavior?
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Jul 13, 2015 03:11
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TheBlandName posted:Honest questions for the sake of the discussion. Are you aware that many people receive intrinsic satisfaction from doing well in a task independent of the reward? Are you aware that such self motivated behavior is consistently indicative of greater satisfaction than reward oriented behavior? And now the "I'm better than you, plebian" subtext comes out into the open. You want a hard game? Great, set the difficulty to hard or impossible or with all the hard second wave options. That choice is there for you. Me? I like to play on normal, sometimes classic if I'm feeling saucy. Why do you think games should take away player choice in that regard? Once again, you are assuming everyone enjoys the same difficulty-to-skill ratio that you determine the game should have.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:15
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The first big game I remember with adaptive difficulty that was well done was Max Payne. You could immediately tell who played through the game normally and who was a save scumming bitch by how hard they thought the game was. Reloaded until you made it through the fight without a scratch? Do that for a few levels and enemies will have instant reaction time and perfect accuracy. Took some damage? Difficulty stayed the same or lowered a bit depending on how much. Yeah, the "game is now unwinnable" happened, but it happened to people who actually deserved it. The average gamer will rarely give a game a second chance if he has other games to play, and you just know the game-the-game save scummer will.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:17
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The problem with most games that do adaptive difficulty is that you are directly incentivizing the player to do counterintuitive and frequently not-fun things in order to succeed. If losing a lot will help me win the game, ultimately, there is a pressure on me to lose sometimes even when I don't want to. That's why I think you'd have to fix the problem by making the difficulty decrease a secondary incentive to something, and have the primary incentive actually encourage you to do well.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:18
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The pressure is to make you play the game instead of trying to game it. OK you lost a battle, but the war isn't over, and to make sure the latter is true, the game eases up a bit on you.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:19
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Suspicious posted:The first big game I remember with adaptive difficulty that was well done was Max Payne. You could immediately tell who played through the game normally and who was a save scumming bitch by how hard they thought the game was. Reloaded until you made it through the fight without a scratch? Do that for a few levels and enemies will have instant reaction time and perfect accuracy. Took some damage? Difficulty stayed the same or lowered a bit depending on how much. And therein lies the problem with your attitude, and in many ways with the attitude behind adaptive difficulty: you think people who play games differently than you do and find enjoyment in playing games in ways that you don't do not deserve to have fun.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:20
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Cythereal posted:And now the "I'm better than you, plebian" subtext comes out into the open. On the contrary, from XCom I want a piss easy game that I can build up a morgue of dozens of bodies. Each martyr a unique story of attempted bravery. But none of the difficulty options allow for that so while XCom is very interesting to me it's not any fun to play. EDIT: The thread is moving fast right now. Edited in the post I was responding to.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:20
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TheBlandName posted:On the contrary, from XCom I want a piss easy game that I can build up a morgue of dozens of bodies. Each martyr a unique story of attempted bravery. But none of the difficulty options allow for that so while XCom is very interesting to me it's not any fun to play. So you want a simultaneously very easy and a very hard game. I suggest playing while drunk.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:23
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MrBims posted:For all the talk of game design I've yet to see a game actually implement it in a way where we have an exception to the general rule of games succeeding despite having dynamic difficulty. Part of this is how almost no one who played those games seems to be aware that they had it
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Jul 13, 2015 03:24
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Suspicious posted:The pressure is to make you play the game instead of trying to game it. OK you lost a battle, but the war isn't over, and to make sure the latter is true, the game eases up a bit on you. The problem with that is that that same pressure pushes you down past playing the game and into gaming it again, from the other direction. Final Fantasy 8 is a good example there; just avoid all XP and the game becomes easier! But avoiding XP is not what people playing an RPG want to do. It feels wrong and weird. There needs to be a counterbalancing force of some kind to provide an incentive in the other direction.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:28
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TheBlandName posted:On the contrary, from XCom I want a piss easy game that I can build up a morgue of dozens of bodies. Each martyr a unique story of attempted bravery. But none of the difficulty options allow for that so while XCom is very interesting to me it's not any fun to play. What you want is basically a Classic/Impossible strategic gameplay but instead of troops ranking up from kills/missions your entire XCOM roster levels up (kinda how LW aliens are based on their research). So you end up with this new mechanic where XCOM has a steady flow of troops that are all ranking/gaining XP but are more prone to dying. Kinda how you can get troops to always start at Squaddie as the game progresses the starting rank goes up as well. Of course, the game would have to be loving brutal for you to need to cycle through so many soldiers. (this sounds pretty fun)
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Jul 13, 2015 03:29
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Cythereal posted:And therein lies the problem with your attitude, and in many ways with the attitude behind adaptive difficulty: you think people who play games differently than you do and find enjoyment in playing games in ways that you don't do not deserve to have fun. Not a Step posted:If you play the game to murder stomp some aliens, play on Normal, shoot hapless aliens and have fun. No one is saying thats bad wrong fun. If you want easy play on easy. That's why easy exists. Meanwhile, some people want the game to remain interesting for them in later levels! This, unfortunately, is not implemented well in XCOM. Apparently, wishing it was is elitist bullshit!
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Jul 13, 2015 03:30
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Strobe posted:Meanwhile, some people want the game to remain interesting for them in later levels! This, unfortunately, is not implemented well in XCOM. Apparently, wishing it was is elitist bullshit! So play Impossible. Or Ironman/Impossible. Or Long War. Or turn on all the difficulty-increasing second wave options. I'm all for hard gameplay modes being available. I think adaptive difficulty, however, is bad and un-fun game design.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:33
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:What you want is basically a Classic/Impossible strategic gameplay but instead of troops ranking up from kills/missions your entire XCOM roster levels up (kinda how LW aliens are based on their research). So you end up with this new mechanic where XCOM has a steady flow of troops that are all ranking/gaining XP but are more prone to dying. Kinda how you can get troops to always start at Squaddie as the game progresses the starting rank goes up as well. Of course, the game would have to be loving brutal for you to need to cycle through so many soldiers. This is kind of how Massive Chalice works. The basic idea of the game is that most of the world has been taken over by a horrible gunge that turns everyone that touches it to dust. Thankfully, your kingdom has the titular massive magic chalice, which can destroy all of the corrupted poo poo everywhere. The problem is that it will take 300 years to charge up its power enough to do this. So you, as the specially-constructed immortal ruler of the kingdom, have to keep it safe for the next three hundred years, which is obviously longer than any individual soldier will live. The bad guys, called the Cadence, tend to attack every decade or two, so any given hero in your arsenal is only ever going to be in a few fights before they die of old age. Which means the real struggle is to get better training and better bloodlines (by marrying heroes to each other and putting high-level heroes in charge of keeps and training facilities) so that the overall quality of your army keeps going up and new heroes start at higher levels. It also means losing people on a mission is a little less painful. It's like... hey, that dude was going to be dead before the next fight anyway, I guess I can let him go.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:35
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Cythereal posted:I'm all for hard gameplay modes being available. I think adaptive difficulty, however, is bad and un-fun game design. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3przu0LZqc
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Jul 13, 2015 03:36
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And I think that stagnant difficulty with increasing player power is bad and un-fun game design.  I want a game that can consistently remain a challenge throughout the campaign. That doesn't automatically mean "I want the game to be harder." Almost the opposite sometimes! I want the possibility for failure to exist without getting it shoved in my face at every turn. XCOM fails pretty hard at that.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:36
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:What you want is basically a Classic/Impossible strategic gameplay but instead of troops ranking up from kills/missions your entire XCOM roster levels up (kinda how LW aliens are based on their research). So you end up with this new mechanic where XCOM has a steady flow of troops that are all ranking/gaining XP but are more prone to dying. Kinda how you can get troops to always start at Squaddie as the game progresses the starting rank goes up as well. Of course, the game would have to be loving brutal for you to need to cycle through so many soldiers. I wonder if it would be possible to hack around with the "New Guy" OTS project from vanilla to implement this. Does Iron Rose or anyone else have any idea?
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Jul 13, 2015 03:37
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IronicDongz posted:The Ratchet and Clank games implemented dynamic difficulty tuning exceptionally well. Some form of adaptive difficulty can be really good game design. People have a bad taste about it because it's usually only noticeable when it's done badly. The issue with XCOM is that it has a difficulty hill. Increasing the difficulty or downloading Long War or turning on second wave options can make the hill longer or higher and thus increase the amount of time the player spends climbing it instead of coasting down it, but the player will ultimately spend the end of the game in victory lap mode. This is a good and intentional design decision, but the nature of the difficulty hill combined with the fact that progress in the game is largely a feedback loop means a player can spend too much of the game coasting and not enough playing.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:38
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IronicDongz posted:I would highly recommend listening to this: why bother its obvious he is doing his deaf hero stand. I mean, there are people who buy Derek Smart games and think they are good. Those people DO exist.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:42
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MikeC posted:why bother its obvious he is doing his deaf hero stand. I mean, there are people who buy Derek Smart games and think they are good. Those people DO exist. Nope, I just disagree that adaptive difficulty is good game design and I haven't found any of the arguments in its favor so far to be persuasive. It's not like this thread has ever not had a grognard "You don't play I/I Long War with my extra hard .ini modification? YOU ARE A BABY WHO PLAYS BABY GAMES!" undertone. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Jul 13, 2015 |
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Jul 13, 2015 03:45
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You should really listen to the thing I linked, then! It's very very true that-Voyager I posted:People have a bad taste about it because it's usually only noticeable when it's done badly.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:48
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Cythereal posted:So play Impossible. Or Ironman/Impossible. Or Long War. Or turn on all the difficulty-increasing second wave options. If a game is going to bill itself as a 100-150 hour campaign (Long War) I want the game to back off and give me breathing space if I hit a roadbump 75 hours in. Long War's *current* adaptive difficulty structure, which exists now, bumps up the difficulty every time you fall behind. The *current* game design has mechanics that snowball failure and leads to death spirals that are very difficult to recover from. Also, Long War's *current* *existing* mechanics cause an anemic response from the aliens if you're dominating the game. With no resources aliens launch fewer offensive missions, they don't accumulate bonus research and they even lose research from successful base raids. Its the opposite of dynamic difficulty. When you're losing, you lose more. When you're winning, you win more. For me, that's the worst kind of difficulty balancing. I don't want to dominate the latter half of the game because it can lead to a very boring grind. If *you* want to dominate the latter half of the game, I guess don't play any mods I might produce (haha I will never produce anything). Or maybe we don't enjoy the same kind of game design? ROFLstomping the second half of Vanilla/EW was a negative for me. If it was a positive for you, sorry? But at least the second half of EW was *short*, and not a drawn out grind. I guess I'm saying I disagree with your views on game design and hope that people make more things I like, even if it means less things you like, because I like me more than you. Sorry. Moddington posted:I wonder if it would be possible to hack around with the "New Guy" OTS project from vanilla to implement this. Does Iron Rose or anyone else have any idea? If you're playing Long War, try this mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/xcom/mods/569/ It gives passive XP for everyone in the barracks over time
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Jul 13, 2015 03:53
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Cythereal posted:Nope, I just disagree that adaptive difficulty is good game design and I haven't found any of the arguments in its favor so far to be persuasive.
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Jul 13, 2015 03:58
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Can we stop talking about "game design" like we actually know what we are talking about?
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Jul 13, 2015 04:10
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Bholder posted:Can we stop talking about "game design" like we actually know what we are talking about? Difficulty curves and feedback loops aren't exactly forbidden knowledge. The difficulty falloff is a legitimate criticism of the game and it's a better discussion than snake boobs.
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Jul 13, 2015 04:14
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Cythereal posted:Playing a game certainly can be a rational economic exchange. Again: why do well if there's no reward for it? No one arguing for adaptive difficulty has given a satisfactory answer to that question. It's a real rough example I know, but hopefully I got the gist of it through. MrBims posted:Dynamic difficulty seems to inevitably lead to extremes and gamey strategies. In the Homeworld games you were encouraged to retire most of your fleet at the end of each mission because the enemy ship count was scaled by your own fleet at the start of a mission, and the final missions of those games were notoriously difficult to people who didn't know it. The optimal way to play Final Fantasy 8 is to level up your characters as little as possible because enemy stats were scaled to your own level and you could boost your power in other ways, and being overleveled was actually a detriment. Mario Kart players feel safer in second place, not first place, for obvious reasons if you have ever played a MK game since 64. Homeworld 2 on the other hand, probably has some of the worst dynamic difficulty I've ever seen, and is somewhat infamous for it. There were no limits to it, so no matter how well you did the enemy would always have more ships than you, and you couldn't steal past your pop-cap like in the first game. It's pretty much a textbook example of how not to do difficulty scaling, and the best way to play is, like you said, retire your entire fleet at the end of a mission so they enemy doesn't have gently caress-off amounts of units. Now that I've Insert name here fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Jul 13, 2015 |
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Jul 13, 2015 04:16
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What was the name of the youtube let's play guy who was aggressively incompetent? I need this for a homework assignment.
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Jul 13, 2015 04:17
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Davethulhu posted:What was the name of the youtube let's play guy who was aggressively incompetent? I need this for a homework assignment. DSP?
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Jul 13, 2015 04:17
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Voyager I posted:Difficulty curves and feedback loops aren't exactly forbidden knowledge. The difficulty falloff is a legitimate criticism of the game and it's a better discussion than snake boobs. Considering there is no understatement and even different gamedevs have completely different ideas about how difficulty should work, no it's really not.
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Jul 13, 2015 04:18
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Cythereal posted:Playing a game certainly can be a rational economic exchange. Again: why do well if there's no reward for it? No one arguing for adaptive difficulty has given a satisfactory answer to that question. Bholder posted:Considering there is no understatement and even different gamedevs have completely different ideas about how difficulty should work, no it's really not.
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Jul 13, 2015 04:19
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Bholder posted:Can we stop talking about "game design" like we actually know what we are talking about? if i am forced to shoot snake ladies in xcom 2 this is BAD game design imo. good game design is all about player agency and furthermore
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Jul 13, 2015 04:23
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