DIFFICULTY: CHALLENGE VS FRUSTRATION

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(Still feel guilty tho)

As long as there actually is a solution, this is true. A game is truly frustrating though when the creator assumed it was solvable, but made some error in design, and it actually isn't. Like making a ghost boss immune to physical damage, and then forgetting to add an elemental weakness or something.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
The key defining element of frustration in the article in the OP - and I think this is an excellent way to define it - seems to be "failures you can't do anything about." But there are multiple things that can cause this, off the top of my head:

- There is literally no solution
- The solution requires reading the developer's mind
- Success is based on the actions of other players, especially if they're random strangers in automatically formed groups during online games
- Success is partially or completely random
- The player's skill is insufficient to win
- The player is capable of "winning," but it is dissatisfying, and still feels like failure

Some of these are easier to fix than others. What level of randomness is okay? How much information can you hide from the player before it starts to become a problem? It can be hard for the developer to tell the difference between players who lack skill and problems that require reading the developer's mind, since the developer can read his own mind quite effortlessly and it all makes perfect sense to him. Things that feel like a hair-raising close win by the skin of your neck to one player will feel, to another player, like a failure to adequately succeed (like having a party member die in every fight). The player's skill can be almost impossible to determine, especially at the beginning of the game. Adding more ways to win is always possible, but it comes at the cost of cheapening the wins of players who didn't need the help.
This is why I feel there is a thin line between frustration and challenging. It's all very subjective on what the player is in the mood for, what they can handle, or what they are used to.

I found that most of the NES rpg's were more challenging (in a fun way) than some of the PS rpg's. Likewise, I found some of the PS games to be more frustrating.

I've played and enjoyed most of the Zelda games I've come across. And yet I sucked at Alundra (when it first came out) and had a hard time figuring out the puzzles or where to go.

Trying to figure out what makes a game cross from challenging to frustrating will change from person to person. As long as its designed well, free of any bugs or glitches, and the developer can make it through their own game, then it's up to the player to decide whether or not it's to their expectations.
slash
APATHY IS FOR COWARDS
4158
Speaking of randomness, it's a really strange and finicky line between fun randomness and frustrating randomness. I hate playing DnD and rolling natural 1s three times in a row, missing all my attacks, because there was literally nothing I could do to change it. In the big picture, of course, three 1s are pretty unlikely, but when it happens it totally sucks (especially because when playing DnD your turn may only come up once every 5-15 minutes; losing a turn is damn near rage-inducing).

Meanwhile I could sit there and play Binding of Isaac for hours, and without exaggerating you can say that 75% of that game is chance-based. However, the randomness in that game still correlates to skill. It's always possible to win as long as you know how to use whatever toolset you've been handed. Sometimes it's harder than others, but it's always possible. Most of the randomness doesn't outright help or hurt you, it just changes how you play the game (getting rapid-fire shots vs. wiggly shots, etc.). In addition, the random stuff that does outright hurt you is a risk that's made clear to you after playing a few times (eating pills may recover or reduce your HP - but you don't have to eat them). You're actually very in control: you choose which gambles to take in Binding of Isaac.

A summary of randomness without frustration
  • A single random effect the player has no control over should never obviously be the major difference between winning and losing.
  • Randomness that doesn't help or hurt the player, but changes the nature of gameplay without removing skill from the equation is powerful and can be very fun.
  • Randomness that does help or hurt the player can also be used to powerful effect, as long as the player is aware that she is taking a calculated gamble and knows the possible outcomes.
The line between challenge and frustration is, as has been said, very thin.

Early in the topic someone mentioned Mega Man and Castlevania as games that apparently are "hard but fair". If we are talking about the first game in this series this couldn't really be farther from the truth. Both games have a mechanic that is generally one of the most frustrating things a platformer can have which is the pushback when hit.

Upon being hit in those games the player character takes a jump backwards and in the name of challenge that means falling into a pit of death. At least some of the time. I don't remember very clearly but I seem to recall that these games also had the thing where you could move up and down screens if you used stairs but if you fell down them it was instant death.

I also remember in Mega Man 2 there was a level (Quick man?) where you fell downward and had to dodge spikes and laser beams that instakilled you. Now Mega Man has never been the most agile faller instead he tends to immediately fall at the maximum speed so apart from falling through a screen in less than a second with very little maneuverability it's also combined with the fact that you have to memorize exactly where and when to move in certain directions.

Basically it's trial and error. And if you fail you die. Personally I find trial and error gameplay to be the most frustrating of all. Mostly because there's essentially nothing more frustrating in a game than dying. And dying is made more frustrating if the last checkpoint or autosave was really far away. I know we should all rely on quicksaves but it seems more and more games do away with them completely and rely purely on checkpoints.

I guess repetitiveness is a source of frustration.

This is often why I really hate boss battles. They often have very high health and although there's that glowing orb you have to hit and it reacts to hitting it (though sometimes it does not and that's even worse) you have to do it over and over and over and over again. And failing once might mean you are dead. This is where challenge and frustration overlap. It might be challenging but it's also incredibly boring.


An example of a boss fight that did everything wrong was a tentacly monster in Resident Evil 5 that I played fairly recently (and I love bringing this up because it frustrated the hell out of me). In the level there was a flamethrower and some canisters you could shoot at. The game made it clear that the monster was "weak to fire" and obviously the flamethrower was to be used.

However when using the flamethrower the ammunition always seem to just run out as the monster was almost killed and the monster always seemed to regenerate with no hint as to if it had taken any actual damage or not. SO I was running around recharging the flamethrower and seemingly almost killing the monster over and over again. Until I finally ran in the wrong spot and the monster killed me. I retried a couple of times but nothing seemed to beat the monster. Finally I killed it with the rocket launcher I had saved in my inventory and afterwards I checked some walkthroughs on how to kill it and apparently I had done the right thing it just was supposed to take ages to kill the monster.

So this kind of repetitiveness is insanely frustrating. Doing a long sequence of things and when one of them fails you have to do it all over again. It's like in the article example of the rock-sliding puzzle where you have finally figured it out, put all the rocks in the right place and then you misclick and the final rock is stuck in a corner. You have to reset it and redo it all over again. It's not that the rock getting stuck is necessarily a bad or frustrating thing (though yeah it is) it's that maybe the puzzle was long and now you have to spend another five minutes aligning everything to a solution that you already figured out.

In that way it's just like dying on a boss where you first have to jump on it five times then punch it in the gut when its gut is exposed and then jump on if five times again and repeat and then you die on the second to last gutpunch and now you have to do it for another fifteen minutes. But you've already done it and the second time it's no longer tense because you know what you're doing and thus you are more likely to screw up.

Worse is of course when the game doesn't tell you what you're doing wrong but kills you for walking in the wrong direction and you retry and retry using the systems the game have taught you to sneak past the barrier but when you reach a certain point a sniper always shoots you. And apparently the game wanted you to walk a little bit to the left all along.

These last paragraphs were just ranting about bad game design. So feel free to ignore that.
author=Shinan
However when using the flamethrower the ammunition always seem to just run out as the monster was almost killed and the monster always seemed to regenerate with no hint as to if it had taken any actual damage or not. SO I was running around recharging the flamethrower and seemingly almost killing the monster over and over again. Until I finally ran in the wrong spot and the monster killed me. I retried a couple of times but nothing seemed to beat the monster. Finally I killed it with the rocket launcher I had saved in my inventory and afterwards I checked some walkthroughs on how to kill it and apparently I had done the right thing it just was supposed to take ages to kill the monster.


Lol, you're not the only one. I ended up using a rocket launcher there too. Stupid boss.xP
Platformers are much closer to the frustration line than most rpgs. Especially with the existence of things like clunky interface (Ninja Gaiden I, where you can't climb the walls you stick to, forcing you to wall jump), respawning screen enemies (Ninja Gaiden, entire series), stupid bats that knock you to your doom (Castlevania), and disappearing blocks (many games, but especially Mega Man).
author=Milennin
author=Shinan
However when using the flamethrower the ammunition always seem to just run out as the monster was almost killed and the monster always seemed to regenerate with no hint as to if it had taken any actual damage or not. SO I was running around recharging the flamethrower and seemingly almost killing the monster over and over again. Until I finally ran in the wrong spot and the monster killed me. I retried a couple of times but nothing seemed to beat the monster. Finally I killed it with the rocket launcher I had saved in my inventory and afterwards I checked some walkthroughs on how to kill it and apparently I had done the right thing it just was supposed to take ages to kill the monster.
Lol, you're not the only one. I ended up using a rocket launcher there too. Stupid boss.xP


aren't you supposed to use the flamethrower to expose its weak point, then shoot the weak point? I remember it taking a long time to beat that boss but I wouldn't call it frustrating. more tedious and time consuming(because of the recharge time), until you find the best strategy. did you even try exploding the canisters to deal extra damage to it? it's a perfect example of how something is only frustrating if you're not doing it right.

plus if your playing with a human partner you can do that more efficiently. if you play with the CPU partner in that game, there are plenty of spots that are harder than they should be.
author=Link_2112
aren't you supposed to use the flamethrower to expose its weak point, then shoot the weak point? I remember it taking a long time to beat that boss but I wouldn't call it frustrating. more tedious and time consuming(because of the recharge time), until you find the best strategy. did you even try exploding the canisters to deal extra damage to it? it's a perfect example of how something is only frustrating if you're not doing it right.

plus if your playing with a human partner you can do that more efficiently. if you play with the CPU partner in that game, there are plenty of spots that are harder than they should be.

The "flamethrower" was impossible to use until you had shot all the weak spots (otherwise it would lash out at you and hurt you). Upon removing all of the weak spots the idea was to run up to it and flame it to death (this of course being quite hard single player since the AI partner had no sense of tactics whatsoever). Upon flaming this creature it would melt away until there was only a little left (using a fully charged flamethrower) then the flamer ammo would run out and the creature would regenerate weak spots and everything with no hint that it had been hurt. I, obviously, assumed that I was supposed to take out the weak spot and then turn it into goo before it regenerated since I assumed that was what it did.

So after shooting canisters (and throwing napalm grenades) and flaming this creature to a pile of ALMOST nothing at least four or five times in a row I tended to just shout out in frustration and then probably die (having run out of herbs and ammo). Not having any idea whether I was close to beating the creature or not

Of course I do not know if this was the "right" approach. But looking at the walkthroughs apparently that's how it was supposed to be done.

Man I really hated that boss. Though I tend to hate all bosses.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Things like sound effects, changing graphics, and damage animations are great tools to tell the player whether they're doing the boss correctly or incorrectly. When a game doesn't use them correctly, and gives you misleading feedback, it can be extremely frustrating because you just have no idea whether you're wasting an entire hour or not. It's also far more satisfying when you feel like you're winning.


author=bulmabriefs
Platformers are much closer to the frustration line than most rpgs.
Maybe it's just that I've probably played three times as many RPGs as all other genres of games combined, but I don't think this is true. The fact that in an RPG, if something is frustrating, there's no option to overcome it with your awesome timing and reflexes and you just have to deal with the unfair numbers can be extremely frustrating. Of the hundreds of RPGs I've played, I'm not sure I can name more than about ten that don't have the possibility of unavoidable bullshit game overs, due to either random numbers (like your attacks missing or enemies hitting your entire party with a low-hitrate area status effect) or things you could never predict (like that the next boss requires paralyze immunity or wind resistance or that choosing to specialize in a certain class is a bad idea).

Of course, on the flip side, I suppose most RPGs will let you just grind for experience points and gold until you're so powerful that all the frustration (and all the challenge) is gone. Usually. It's actually still possible to have frustration even after removing all the challenge though - weak enemies that cast a 5% hitrate area death spell, for example. That's not even technically hard, because there's no challenge to overcome. Nothing you have to do. Just random game overs.
Isrieri
"My father told me this would happen."
6155
On the other hand, with RPGs there's Always A Way Around Things if the game's structured properly. The most obvious being level grinding as LockeZ said. Or some kind of strategy you can use against each enemy like Use Fire on Water Element and all that jazz. As long as you have the proper resources and play smart, you'll make it through. But with platformers, your resources are often dependent on how well your reflexes are. Sometimes a game might present a real nasty roadblock. And unless you have the patience to practice it, that could become very frustrating since you'll be stuck in the same spot until you inevitably get better.

Now that I think about it, the problem is pretty much the same thing between genres. I think it's more dependent on the kind of games you prefer to play, cuz it seems to me people have more patience with certain kinds of gameplay.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
platformers : timing :: rpgs : strategy

when the two are done right, anyway

But yeah, just like a person can have poor enough reflexes that they really just can't beat I Wanna Be The Guy no matter how hard they try, they can be bad enough at RPGs that they really just can't beat Dragon Age on nightmare difficulty no matter how hard they try. That's a distinction of difficulty, though, in both cases. Not frustration. The optimal level of difficulty is what varies from player to player. It's why Dragon Age has three easier difficulty modes, and why I Wanna Be The Guy is a free game that almost no one can beat. When your skill doesn't factor in is when it becomes frustrating.

I did list insufficient player skill as a possible source of having no way to win above, but after thinking more, I don't think it deserves to be listed at all. It is a possible cause of failure, but it's categorically different in a couple ways: mostly that there's nothing wrong with it, and also that it's unavoidably present in every single game ever made.
Usually, games will ask for more than one skill. If you're lacking in a skill, you can compensate by having an abundance in another.

I played Contra a lot for a while. I never got very good at timing or had particular good reflexes, but I did learn how to avoid getting into the situations where those skills were required. For example, I learned how the constantly randomly spawning enemies moves and could predict which spots are safe and which spots will be safe in a few seconds. I had similar experiences with other platformers.

I have also read blogs from people playing competitive FPS saying that they aren't very good at dodging or aiming, but they are good at knowing where the opponents are due to clues like door opening sounds, which pickups are taken and which are still on the ground and so on. They use that skill to ambush their opponents and that way usually don't have to dodge or try to aim at a dodging target.

For RPGs, there are often in battle tactics and out of battle strategy that can be used. I have noticed that the better you are at customizing the characters, the less important it becomes to use your skills in a clever way as you can instead just overpower your opponents. There are also people who manages to play low level runs by using their skills in creative ways (although they often also rely on luck.)

As long as your game asks for more than one skill and it's possible to compensate for a lack of one skill by being good at the other, the player is less likely to get stuck than if a challenge solely checks one skill. What can be frustrating then is if your game suddenly bottlenecks a skill that the player has been relying on so far. For example, we have a platformer where bosses have patterns, all save one that is, who instead moves very random.

Personally, I think that you can design challenges like that, but they should not be designed to also be particular hard. The randomly moving boss becomes extra hard for pattern recognition players, but not so much for reflex players. If pattern recognition players find said boss one of the hardest while reflex players finds it one of the easier ones, it will work out. However, if instead the reflex players think that the boss is one of the hardest, then the pattern recognition players are screwed.

For that reason I think that whenever you design a challenge that for one or another reason differs from the rest, said challenge should not also be designed to be one of the hardest ones.
Brady
Was Built From Pixels Up
3134
As much as I do agree with LockeZ that "absence of skill" shouldn't be factored in on the same category since it's an unavoidable issue in every game every made, I'm also with Crystalgate. An absence of skill may be unavoidable, but that doesn't mean the developer should just force the player to deal with it; they can add in other features or possibilities that let the player get around that unavoidable issue.
Although to be fair, that shouldn't apply to all games, either. Games such as I Wanna Be The Guy are just made specifically for one purpose really, so adding in RPG elements to balance it out or some such would just kill the vibe.

RPG games though, I agree, do seem to lack as wide a net as they really should. As much as most of them harp on about the ability to pick and choose what you want, you generally wind up being stuck with the optimum strategy and all others failing to compare. Yahtzee said it in his Deus Ex reviews, that a shitty RPG is one that lets you pick and choose which skills/preferences you excel at, then bottlenecking you to follow the developers idea of how to win. An RPG that not only avoids this shittiness, but also (as Crystalgate says) takes a few steps away from ever being frustrating is one that allows you to tackle every challenge with a variety of methods, and lets the player decide which they can best utilise, or which they prefer using most.

Hard to get frustrated at a game for being too hard when you know that if you just can't do it, you have a couple of other options to test out. Frustration usually breeds from knowing that you're stuck to doing and that if you can't do it, you're screwed.
author=LockeZ
Things like sound effects, changing graphics, and damage animations are great tools to tell the player whether they're doing the boss correctly or incorrectly. When a game doesn't use them correctly, and gives you misleading feedback, it can be extremely frustrating because you just have no idea whether you're wasting an entire hour or not. It's also far more satisfying when you feel like you're winning.


author=bulmabriefs
Platformers are much closer to the frustration line than most rpgs.
Maybe it's just that I've probably played three times as many RPGs as all other genres of games combined, but I don't think this is true. The fact that in an RPG, if something is frustrating, there's no option to overcome it with your awesome timing and reflexes and you just have to deal with the unfair numbers can be extremely frustrating. Of the hundreds of RPGs I've played, I'm not sure I can name more than about ten that don't have the possibility of unavoidable bullshit game overs, due to either random numbers (like your attacks missing or enemies hitting your entire party with a low-hitrate area status effect) or things you could never predict (like that the next boss requires paralyze immunity or wind resistance or that choosing to specialize in a certain class is a bad idea).

Of course, on the flip side, I suppose most RPGs will let you just grind for experience points and gold until you're so powerful that all the frustration (and all the challenge) is gone. Usually. It's actually still possible to have frustration even after removing all the challenge though - weak enemies that cast a 5% hitrate area death spell, for example. That's not even technically hard, because there's no challenge to overcome. Nothing you have to do. Just random game overs.


The frustration of rpgs tends to come almost solely from its random number devil aspects, lack of handy save points (or lack of the ability to save anywhere if battles are hard), confusing puzzle bosses (particularly when it uses a brute force strategy so you don't realize it is a puzzle boss), and poor balance in favor of the enemy (or sometimes the hero, creating the opposite extreme, boredom). Having played action RPGs (like Rogue Galaxy and Kingdom Hearts), the ability to dodge mitigates much of the random number problem by allowing you not to just sit quietly while slaughtered (of course, later enemies will 1-hit you or try to anyway, but the fact you can move out of the way instead eases the pain). There's also fighting RPGs like the Tales games, that have this feature to some extent.

By contrast, the reason I feel platformers produce far more frustration, is not through uncontrollable aspects, but through controllable. There's a platform that disappears, and you didn't jump on it quite in time. It's all your fault and you know it. Or your controller is broken and you'd like to make the jump, but because you've played a number of rpgs and been rough on it, Mario RPG had those terrible vines to climb on the way to Nimbus Land. About this point, my controller began to malfunction and auto-move, pushing me in a random direction mid-jump (no, why are you going left). I had a similar problem with the Disney Town section in Birth By Sleep, I was crunching a bunch of buttons, and the disc slot kept giving me an open error because I was pushing down and it thought it should open. In the middle of that stupid ice cream music challenge that you have to get good or higher. If anything messes up your timing, it drives you nuts. In an rpg, simply including certain aspects (a savepoint that recovers you, a way to continue as is with a penalty instead of restarting having lost that one rare item, time to heal properly between attacks), makes a game challenging rather than frustrating.

You want to know frustrating and cheap deaths? Play Resident Evil 6 and you would find yourself raging at the designers every 10 minutes. XD
I recommend A Theory of Fun as an overview of principles on this.
SunflowerGames
The most beautiful user on RMN!
13323

Ninja Giadon 2 had problems with difficulty vs. frustration.
Getting killed easily is one thing, but being unable to
prevent it in some cases is downright wrong. The worst example
of this is the guys with the rocket launchers.

On, the otherhand, I found games like Zelda (NES) difficult,
but not frustrating because I knew there was a key to defeating
the game.
Just read the theory of fun (I like that the ending adds the "And You" player thank that's often in games). Of course, past a certain point, I didn't really grasp alot of it.

While it does provide a good overview of easy vs hard games, it doesn't really touch on why some games are frustrating and others are challenging. I don't believe it's as simple as a line or spectrum. I think you could have the same insane level of difficulty, but the fact that you've put tools in place to solve the puzzle (example: savepoints restore hp, meaning that although battles are killer, you can camp) is the actual difference.

A game is said to be challenging when the player finds a difficult situation but which the author of the game is apparently helping (the degree of help may be a factor, "here I gave you 100 gp when buying items requires 1000 gp at least" is not helping enough).

A game is said to be frustrating when the player finds a difficult situation but which the author of the game is not helping or even hindering the player. If done well however, the player gets a sense of fun from having beaten not only the monsters but also the author's design.
Would this be the definition of frustrating we're looking for?

Challenging? Difficulty that doesn't rely on it.