WANTING TO MAKE YOUR GAME DIFFICULT.

...challenging and hard mean the same thing.

Fun and boring are indeed opposites. Most people use hard and challenging interchangeably to both mean "requires skill or critical thinking to complete."

Obviously there's nothing good about giving your game bad controls or unintuitive interfaces or putting incorrect information in your help file or whatever. No one meant that.

author=LockeZ
Fun and boring are indeed opposites. Most people use hard and challenging interchangeably to both mean "requires skill or critical thinking to complete."

Obviously there's nothing good about giving your game bad controls or unintuitive interfaces or putting incorrect information in your help file or whatever. No one meant that.

For example, all of us can imagine the scenarios where "HOW AM I GOING TO GET PAST THIS PART?" After trying for over a half hour. - This is plain hard, and tedious, and it's probably because the game maker's mistake. In Mother's development, Itoi admitted that he made Mt. Itoi literally hard because he lazily wanted to get the game finished.

Then there's the "This is annoying, but I'm getting the hang of it." This IS hard, but it's more-so challenging and tactfully thought out to establish this 'trial-and-error' idea. Many good games do this.

The Mario & Luigi RPGs are the opposite of challenging. It is always practically impossible to lose if you are making any sort of attempt to win, and often literally impossible to lose no matter what you do. They require no thought, no strategy, no preparation - the closest you ever get to any sort of skill involved is timing your button presses for critical hits, but doing so is always either extremely easy or completely unnecessary or both.

Basically, the Mario & Luigi games are at the bottom of the barrel of what I'd consider the "too easy to be fun" games. They might easily be the easiest RPGs ever created. They bore me to tears.

Games like Demons Souls are hard as fuck and market their entire appeal out of being completely and totally unforgiving to dumbshit player mistakes. Then on the extreme end of the spectrum you have games like Super Kaizo World which exploded in popularity in its day.

There's definitely a market out there for ballbreaking games if anyone is interested in making them.

author=ChaosProductions
You haven't played them and their well-thought-out bosses and interesting random enemies, then. Honestly. You don't have to lose to be challenged; scrutinizing enemies' attacks for opportunities to dodge and counterattack was more than enough.

I've played both Paper Mario RPGs and two of the Mario & Luigi RPGs. I beat most of those due to boredom/OCD, but they weren't fun. For there to be a challenge, it has to take effort and skill to not lose. Otherwise it wasn't a challenge. That's the goramn definition of a challenge.

Ideally every fight should be an even match. If you're stronger or better than the enemy, then it's no challenge and thus no fun. This implies you should lose about half the time, on average; but in a game where you only get a save point every 30 minutes, that would clearly be absurdly unplayable. So to make your game challenging but still accessible, you have to create some sort of system where the player can easily recover from mistakes and try again. Like the "retry battle" option in Wild ARMs games and FF13, or the SOL Restore option in Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, or some other innovation.

Of course, predicting how skilled the player is can be nearly impossible. Thus why I like to include a difficulty setting. Then you get the best of both worlds, ne? I realize there are people who just like easy games. But I can't really see the downside to letting the player select the difficulty.

Yeah usually my favorite RPGs where the ones that came out around 1994 to 1999. Most of those games didn't have you walking back and forth farming small amounts of gold and exp. I always loved boss fights that where hard but had a trick to winning it easy. But I never liked RPGs where it was a breeze to get through but when you get to the final level it's harder than $hit! I'm worried that my game might have been too hard. But yeah. The game I just played was phantasy star three. I couldn't play it for long. I hated how you got poisoned almost every fight and your character walked as if the ground was quicksand. Now phantasy star four was much better! Was it because it came out in the golden era of 1994? I think so.

author=harmonic
In regards to this topic, as I have grown older, I have thought more and more that if I were to be introduced to my favorite games from my adolescent and teen years, I would be mostly bored with them. My love for these golden age games comes in large part from nostalgia, and my different, more youthful outlook on life and imagination 10-15 years ago. Nowadays, games *need* more modern gameplay mechanics. Grinding, limited MP that does not regen without inns/items, and impossible dungeon mazes are just completely outdated. Everything needs to be intuitive and streamlined.

Speak for yourself!

author=LightningLord2
High stats are a pragmatic, yet real, difficulty - if they mean to enforce grinding, it's still easy to overcome, it just takes longer to perform the task, which is fake longevity. Other examples include unnecessarily large maps, high loading times, much backtracking and so on.

Yeah, grinding isn't real difficulty. Grinding actually removes real difficulty. "This fight is hard now, but it's easy if you press the A button as fast as you can for two hours first. Do it for six hours, and whole game becomes easy. So if you don't want to learn how to play the game, that's okay - just have way less fun and we'll call it even. And in fact, we're going to subconsciously encourage you to do so, with collections and sidequests and bestiaries."

That's a shitty design philosophy. I like to come up with different ways to make grinding be either impossible or not unbalancing. I like how The World Ends With You handles it - levels only give you HP, and you can lower your own level to increase enemies' drop rates. So running all the time will eventually kill you, but grinding doesn't keep you from having to learn the fights, and if you're bothering with the collections then grinding makes you have to grind less.

TWEWY lets you set your level anywhere between 1 and a maximum level - it's your maximum level that grows with experience. Lowering your level increases a multiplier to the drop rates of enemies.

That's a difficulty slider. None of this "please trade x hours of your life to make this section easier".