The Video Game Critic

How important to you is challenge in games? Is "fun" separate from or related to difficulty?

I personally have more fun with games that I can spend a lot of time getting to know. Games with a high degree of difficulty and/or complexity can seem almost inexhaustible due to the high degree of strategy, planning, and sheer skill required to advance. I also feel like there's greater value in a game that requires more time to master. Finally, the sense of satisfaction derived from finally comprehending a deep, complex gameplay system is the one of biggest reasons why I keep gaming.

What do you guys think? Does extreme difficulty or complexity motivate you or turn you off? I'm thinking of games like Starcraft, Civilization, Demon's Souls, Ghouls n Ghosts, anything by Paradox Interactive, Battletoads, Missile Command, Defender, Robotron: 2084, etc...

I like challenge as a way to keep the game from getting stale. Games that present challenge AS the game (I Wanna Be the Guy for instance) get old quickly.

It might be a per-game thing, though. I can get into Robotron for hours at a time.

I like games that are incredibly hard but not cheap, hence possible to master. The Neo Geo is a perfect example. I've played some games for over month until I could beat it on 1 credit 

I prefer games that you can get into quick, but slowly unveil deeper gameplay mechanics. I like to be challenged not frustrated, if a games is too difficult it will turn me off.

A few examples of games I believe get the balance right

Revenge of Shinobi
Sega Rally
Bioshock
Uncharted

Challenge is appreciated as long as it's a "fair" challenge that requires skill and not a challenge that is largely due to Fake Difficulty(I.E. broken controls, being dependent on luck moreso then actual skill, etc). Of course even then there are some games which require far too much skill for me to have much patience with, like Dark Souls for example, you pretty much have to become a hardcore expert if you want even the slimmest chance of surviving, and as a whole I just found that game much more frustrating then fun, so I lost interest in it after awhile.

As a guy who plays games mostly for the stories they tell, I'm one of the few who appreciates really easy games. A lot of the games I play have turn based combat, which can get frustrating if all you want to do is get to the next cutscene to find out what happens next. I just beat Tales of Xillia, and I loved it because the fights were easy, so I could keep going through the story. Having to die and restart a fight, even if it's not a turn based game, pulls me out of the story and breaks the experience.

I lean towards preferring difficult games, possibly because I started out on the NES. A lot of both my recent favorites (Super Meat Boy, Hotline Miami, The Binding of Isaac, Bayonetta) and the older games I've gone back to over the last couple of years (Contra, Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania III) are challenging games that force you to play at a high level to succeed. Playing fighting games online against people who were better than me also gives me a lot of pleasure, even those I need to take a break sometimes to keep from losing my mind. I haven't played Dark Souls yet, but I'm excited to; the game appears to take a while to get into, but the people who pushed through the unwelcoming exterior almost universally consider it one of the best games ever made.

On the other hand, Silent Hill 2 is one of my absolute favorite games and it's relatively easy, relying on it's atmosphere, story and characters to keep your attention. I really enjoyed both the first two Batman Arkham games (haven't played the 3rd one yet) because they did a superb job of immersing you in the experience of being Batman and living in his comic-book reality, and both of those games were fairly easy (although the second one drifted at times into hand-holding and pushing you in the direction it wanted you to go, which is a step too far in my eyes). The real test is going to be playing something that I can't really fail at, an aspect that a couple of games I recently purchased (Gone Home and Dear Esther) share; after I play those I'll be able to better answer how I feel about the need for difficulty in a game.

I honestly don't mind if a game is too hard or too easy as long as it's fair.

[QUOTE=Vexer]

Like Totalbiscuit, I personally don't consider stuff like Dear Esther to really be a "game" as there's no real interactivity at all, I find that sort of thing to be very dull and not at all interesting, i'd seriously rather play Ride To Hell: Retribution then to go anywhere near something like Dear Easther ever again..

One game I played through recently that was pretty easy was Murdered: Soul Suspect, but I didn't mind because it was an enjoyable experience overall.

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Dear Esther, A Machine for Pigs, Gone Home...

Whether they fit the definition of a "game" or not doesn't make them any less fantastic. I love what thechineseroom and the Fullbright Company are doing and I hope they keep doing it.