Discussion We know what makes good difficulty, so what makes good easiness?

[Deleted member 3315]

Something I've appreciated about FromSoft's mainstream breakthrough is how we've started to discuss what makes a high difficulty level good. Many have realized that it's easy enough to make a game difficult, but hard to make a game satisfyingly difficult. Most have come to the conclusion that the key to satisfying difficulty is to make it the player's fault for failing rather than the game's fault, therefore encouraging the player to get better.

But while there is frustrating difficulty and satisfying difficulty, I posit that there's boring easiness and satisfying easiness. "Good easiness" can make the player feel powerful right off the bat much like good difficulty can make the player feel powerful because they've earned it; bad easiness can make the player feel bored much like bad difficulty can make the player feel frustrated.

So I'd like to ask: what is the key to good easiness? What separates the usual Kirby feeling-powerful easiness from, say, DS/Wii-era Zelda boring easiness?

 

[Brock Reiher]

Needs to look cool, feel good to move the character, and needs swift pacing. Kirby Dreamland is great because it takes 20min to beat it

 

[Deleted member 3315]

Needs to look cool, feel good to move the character, and needs swift pacing. Kirby Dreamland is great because it takes 20min to beat it

Is it possible that easiness by itself can't hold a modern 10-100hr game no matter how good it is?

 

[Brock Reiher]

Is it possible that easiness by itself can't hold a modern 10-100hr game no matter how good it is?

I think almost nothing can hold a 10-100hr game, you need a really good game if you're hitting over 8hr imo

 

[GamerJM]

It needs to still keep the player engaged. For example, a game shouldn't be easy because there's one very obvious broken strategy that everyone can just use. A game also shouldn't be so easy that I don't even really need to pay attention when playing it (unless it's a game designed around the player vibing with it in the background or something).

 

[Deleted member 3315]

It needs to still keep the player engaged. For example, a game shouldn't be easy because there's one very obvious broken strategy that everyone can just use. A game also shouldn't be so easy that I don't even really need to pay attention when playing it (unless it's a game designed around the player vibing with it in the background or something).

Sounds like a rock-paper-scissors-type system would be a nice way of doing that, where instead of mashing your regular attack being the single most time-efficient way of dealing with everything, you always have a counter for every situation plus the time to access it; you still just need to pay attention as to what counter you need to use at the time.

 

[Party Sklar]

Totally agree with @GamerJM about the fact that a game has to be engaging. Engagement can be achieved through gameplay, but it also can be achieved through great presentation, music, and writing (the most recent exemple of that would be Origami King)

 

[Deleted member 1141]

I kept going back and forth on this topic when I first woke up and honestly? I disagree with the OP and I also have some issues about how difficulty encourages you to "get better", specifically due to people plateauing and having disabilities.

Let me explain a bit from my thoughts about what difficulty is and isn't.

Difficulty is a subjected level of how "difficult" a game will be to an individual playing. Many times, people look at difficulty in a binary sense, where it's "easy" "normal", and "hard', but the reality is that the individuality of each person who plays a game, will have a different experience on each difficulty. Before I get into the disability angle of this, the fact of the matter is everyone is going to have a plateau and limit to how far they can get in a game. I actually think the Souls/Soulsborne/souls-like are absolutely horrible and terrible for this, because players will go into these games and reach their plateau and never be able to overcome it because of this.

Many players have a limit to where their skill level can take them on a game, in which the games only having a default "difficulty", can gatekeep even these players. Difficulty in itself can never be really categorized in the same sense of binary conditions, because at the end of the day, people will have different skill levels and different needs to succeed. There is no actual "good" and "bad" difficulty, because you can't define something that is not even binary.

But what if the difficulty is at odds with your disability and a mode that many people would find objectively "bad" because the difficulty is too easy, is significantly difficulty for players who have said disabilities?

I'll speak on my experience as a disabled adult.

Disabilities, unfortunately, affect my ability to play games. They range from "slower response time", "depth/visual perception and unable to understand spatial relation", and I also have an issue where my brain has a limit of how many processes I can have using my fingers, in which prevents me able to do games with numerous button combinations: It will literally cause my brain either to become confused and extreme cases, cause my brain to freeze up/misfire resulting it weird reactions to my movement of my hand and body (this happened with me on the chopping minigame for Ratatouille minigame in Kingdom Hearts 3). I also have other issues but I'll focus on this for now.

One thing that I run into and it's a problem a lot is the button/hand limitation I mentioned and slower reaction time. When I was playing Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, I had to drop down to Story mode, because of the problems I experienced above. Story mode was "just" enough to help me with my disabilities in which I couldn't overcome limitations of my own disabilities and I'll be frank: Story mode was exceptionally difficult for me at times and some of the later areas and bosses really pushed me over the edge at times, notably the final boss. If I'd been forced to have even used Normal mode, I don't think I'd been able to have the best experience.

But I've seen people fine "Story mode" too easy, but for me with living with disabilities that limit my button usage and reaction times, it was enough to be able power through some sections and still find it enjoyable, but difficult experience.

Difficulty is extremely subjective. What makes a good difficulty for one person, another person will find bad. Especially once get into the fact many, many, MANY, gamers have disabilities and even these difficulty options can assist with making the games both more approachable and accessible to said gamers. There'll never be an agreement on this subject, because it's individualistic in nature and it's subject to each person, both down to plateauing on skill level and disabilities.

The only thing we should agree upon is really pushing for making games more approachable and accessible for gamers. Not what makes a "good easiness" and "good difficult game", because it's core, it'll be subjective.

 

[Sheldon]

Yeah, I gotta disagree with the thread premise as well. The challenge of making a challenging game for everyone hasn't been beaten. At best games hit the right difficulty estimate for a large section of their audience. If anything, we've solved how to make easy engaging games: give players intrinsically fun actions to play around with, surround them with interesting sights and memorable moments, or - best of all - design a game not around the idea of beating it but as tools of self-expression where success comes in individual shapes and colors, not in the form of a credits screen.

 

[Yoshifan31]

Honestly pretty much any Nintendo game knows how to do this, enthusiast forums often forget about that

The fact that you mention Wii Zelda is pretty telling. In forums, fans are always especially hard on ambitious long running series such as Zelda or Pokemon while forgetting that those will always be someone’s first game in the series. It’s a valid complaint to say that Twilight Princess is too easy, the amount of enemy attacks that only deal a quarter of a heart is especially noticeable. However, if you look outside of forums, you’ll see people on places like Yahoo Answers constantly asking for help, getting stumped on the so-called “babby’s first puzzles”. That’s why it’s important to keep a sense of perspective even if you’re a series veteran. Sure, the puzzles aren’t as hard as the ones in dedicated puzzle games (a lot of them are hard solely due to bad design tbh). It’s true that the combat is easy as well, when enemies are pushovers that only do a quarter of a heart per hit it kind of doesn’t encourage you to engage with some of the systems more, like you don’t need to heal with bee larva because you have no more potions or hit enemies with the hawk because you have no more arrows. Despite all that, the game is still fun because it’s very varied, it constantly introduces you new areas, new dungeons, new items, new puzzles, new enemies. It hit the spot as the latest “new epic normal Zelda game”, no amount of nitpicking will change that.

Meanwhile, a lot of random AAA games from that time are the perfect example of bad easiness. Assassin’s Creed, which was supposed to be a Prince of Persia spinoff, essentially threw platforming out of the window in favor of pressing the right trigger to parkour. You can completely trivialize the combat by spamming the parry button, no timing involved. When the game being easy takes away player agency, that’s how it’s not good. While I’m at it, it was especially hypocritical how you had complaints about “handholding” in Nintendo games, but nothing about how the rest of the industry has objective checklists and make every single interactable object shiny. I remember when Red Steel 2 was supposed to be “one of the best HARDCORE games on Wii, they used the Motion Plus better than Nintendo, Skyward Sword is way too casual”. I dropped that game halfway because it was simply not interesting at all outside of a few combat encounters, I thought it felt like a neverending tutorial with how the game explicitly points to everything you need to do. Just don’t have a robotic companion character and no one will complain about the game “insulting your intelligence” I guess

 

[Deleted member 3315]

@Mendinso & @Sheldon :

I wholeheartedly agree that difficulty is subjective. Some people will want "chip you down" difficulty, where you're pelted with many weak, fast attacks from many different sides. Some people like the "telegraphed borderline OHKO" difficulty, where you can see every attack coming, but if you commit to a mistake you'll suffer hard for it.

That said:

At best games hit the right difficulty estimate for a large section of their audience.

While there are many ways to do high difficulty, I'd say that only some of those will make an engaging sort of difficulty. There's a reason why, when it comes to platformers, people love how challenging Crash Bandicoot is but see something like Mario Lost Levels as unfair.

Developers absolutely need to know their audience if they want to select a difficulty level to design around, but there are still good and bad ways to make the game difficult.

@Yoshifan31 : TBH, I don't think the main problem with TP is that enemies deal little damage. As I said above, "chip you down" difficulty is a thing. The problem is that there's no way for enemies to punish pure B mashing. Also, the sword skills are practically only there just to style on enemies, and they're very time-inefficient otherwise.

 

[Sheldon]

It goes further. Not only is what is good difficulty subjective. What is difficult is subjective. Some may sleepwalk through Hollow Knight and never feel the triumph I felt at finally overcoming Radiance because they one-shot what was, for me, a transcendental gaming experience. Other players may have their Dark Souls moments beating bosses in Kirby.

And beyond that things get more complicated still:

Most have come to the conclusion that the key to satisfying difficulty is to make it the player's fault for failing rather than the game's fault, therefore encouraging the player to get better.

This isn't the full picture, either. Sometimes giving players permission to blame the game rather than themselves is good and what allows them to keep going and ultimately succeed. Miyamoto has talked about this in relation to why Mario isn't a 100% accurate puppet of the player's intention and input. He's slippery. He's got momentum. He is his own character. That is what allows players to seperate themselves from failures and yell "No, stupid Mario!" at the screen and immediately try again, without their frustration turning inwards and becoming harmful.

 

[jnWake]

For me, if a game is designed to be "easy", then what matters is how "fun" the game is. A game doesn't really need to "challenge" you if it's fun to play.

A good example for me is Kirby. Kirby games tend to be "easy" but they offer gameplay with so many options, sometimes combinations and scenarios that they're just fun. Stealing powers from enemies and every power having deep movesets makes for an engaging experience IMO and that's what usually makes Kirby games great. Kirby games also have the thing with some additional modes designed to be pretty hard that's also cool but not the topic of discussion.

That said, these things can be very genre dependant and there are many genres where being "easy" doesn't work that well IMO. For example, games with deep tactical/strategy systems usually don't work that well if they aren't challenging enough since it means most systems become a bit unnecessary. Difficulty options help here of course.

 

[Deleted member 3315]

This isn't the full picture, either. Sometimes giving players permission to blame the game rather than themselves is good and what allows them to keep going and ultimately succeed. Miyamoto has talked about this in relation to why Mario isn't a 100% accurate puppet of the player's intention and input. He's slippery. He's got momentum. He is his own character. That is what allows players to seperate themselves from failures and yell "No, stupid Mario!" at the screen and immediately try again, without their frustration turning inwards and becoming harmful.

Yes, it's good to give the player room for consequence and error rather than just letting the player teleport wherever, whenever they want.

But there's still a difference between giving the player character momentum and consequence and letting the player be OHK'd by an untelegraphed attack. The key here is to let the player observe what's coming up in some way and react accordingly.

 

[Rooster]

I think one element of good easy games is having something optional within the game that is actually challenging. It doesn't need to be done to beat the game, it's not an essential aspect of the game, and it can be fully enjoyed without dedicating time to this more difficult aspect, but there is something in there for players who either want a challenge, who have otherwise mastered the game, or for those obsessive completionists.

Something that tests the skills learned in the game to a high degree. A very challenging secret boss, an unlockable difficulty/mode, some precarious collectable, the ability to eschew the guided route and challenge late-game enemies early... something.

 

[Christo750]

To me, there are two kinds of "easy". A game that attempts to provide some sort of challenge but knows it's not actually challenging. Or a game that, more or less, carries you to the end.

For the latter, I think sound design is probably the most important thing. Edith Finch comes to mind. It's painfully slow to move around and graphically it's not the best but walking up to that house and listening to the foliage around me, then going inside and hearing the floorboards creak under me, the game becomes very immersive. Flower is another great example. Playing as a stream of petals and flying through the sound of light winds is so serene.

The former needs good controls and scenarios. Journey and Abzu come to mind.

 

[Deleted member 3315]

A game that attempts to provide some sort of challenge but knows it's not actually challenging.

Are you talking about a game that is technically hard by default but is "easy to make easy"? TBH, I kinda feel that "easy to make easy" is a lot more compelling than selecting difficulty level from a menu.