Comments on Pixel Poppers: Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid...

As a previous proponent of ‘there shouldn’t even b...

2010-06-23T13:37:51.300-07:00

As a previous proponent of ‘there shouldn’t even be a difficult setting’, I now see the error of my ways. There is nothing negative about a multitude of difficulties where any person can find the most appropriate challenge level for their abilities. In fact, I now understand that is a great asset.

Although, I still see nothing wrong with gamers wanting an appropriate level of recognition corresponding to their accomplishments rather than facing someone minimizing or trivializing something they value.

The argument about status might be relevant, but I think it is more accurate to focus on the value placed on the games by different groups. This is about more than status; it’s about identity. After all, the status of gamers has consisted of negative perceptions, opinions, and stereotypes for decades, but pride for their passion has meant their identity has endured.

Now that the term is no longer pejorative, more people are claiming it. In response, gamers are trying to separate the previous identity from the new one, like with the casual / hardcore distinction. On top of which, access to status is still there: all you have to do is explain your accomplishment a little more, for example, beating Gears of War on Insane, or beating Contra without the code.

It’s not public opinion or status gamers want back and, as you note, it’s not that a difficulty setting truly jeopardizes the challenge of a game; what is sought is the protection of their identity.

THANK YOU FOR WRITING THIS! For a long time I've b...

2010-06-04T00:03:13.033-07:00

THANK YOU FOR WRITING THIS! For a long time I've been put off by Steve Napierski and his comic, in large part due to his incessant fanboy whining. Good on you, sir!

Easy mode can even be a good thing for all those s...

2010-01-31T10:32:48.024-08:00

Easy mode can even be a good thing for all those status seekers...
Having someone play Guitar Hero on easy is just the thing you want when you've beaten the game on expert! Admiration will be yours.

@uhzHiro That's more fantastic news that some gam...

2010-01-29T02:59:08.212-08:00

@uhzHiro

That's more fantastic news that some games are =finally= starting to get it right. I've been railing about this stuff for many years, and you really hit close to home with the Left 4 Dead comment, as that's my most played game over the last 6 months but I am continually disappointed by it's sorry Versus mode non-matchmaking. Especially since it's so much fun when you =do= get a good game - but that's about 1 in 10 as you state.

I'm not sure Heroes of Newerth sounds like my kind of thing, but I shall definitely be checking it out now. Thanks again, and I hope Dr Prof doesn't mind this tangent. :)

Actual difficulty sliders would probably be unpopu...

2010-01-28T20:13:17.211-08:00

Actual difficulty sliders would probably be unpopular in MMOs. There are still other solutions, however. World of Warcraft has a variety of types of content that vary considerably in their accessibility. General questing is pretty darn easy, especially if you team up. Five-man instances are harder, raids and heroics harder still, and PvP is where the difficulty tops out. And every player is free to play whichever of these content types they choose.

The past 3 raiding instances of WoW have binary difficulty settings: normal modes tuned to be more accessible than traditional raid content, and "hard modes" tuned to raiding's traditional, punishing schedule.

I personally have no problem with a range of diffi...

2010-01-28T17:19:26.614-08:00

I personally have no problem with a range of difficulties. Take Bayonetta. Automatic Very Easy mode can be played one handed and with very little in the way of reflexes, while normal mode is nearly as difficult as DMC4 and Hard certainly is Hard. The achievement aspect is still there thanks to Trophies/Achievements. You can spot the hardcore Bayonetta players by the fact they have the trophy for finishing it on Hard mode. I'd like to see more of this approach in the future.

What? There's a Firefly game coming out? I hope it...

2010-01-28T17:09:23.060-08:00

What? There's a Firefly game coming out? I hope it has bonus reaver missions and I get to play River...

sorry, your post locked me at the Firefly part :)

But alas, as a GenX'r I have to say that there is no personal value in 'getting past a level' in hardcore mode. With work and family and a career to massage, I only have time for fun games....like the Lego Series....where they can be hard for those that want or easy fun.

I miss firefly.

You are missing the correlation that your dumbing ...

2010-01-28T15:01:38.107-08:00

You are missing the correlation that your dumbing down Firefly to appeal to a broader audience.

Also the comic book marked wounded itself by catering not to a older market but to the collectors market rather than simply writing and drawing good stories.

Some games are getting a lot better at multiplayer...

2010-01-28T12:21:09.624-08:00

Some games are getting a lot better at multiplayer matchmaking.

Heroes of Newerth, which is a DotA based game currently in open beta, does it very well. In HoN, you have a skill rating based on various factors, which fluctuates after every game. When you join a match lobby, you join one team or the other, and can be locked with any friends you have with you. Then, based on skill rating, all the non locked people are auto balanced, forced to one team or the other, to even the teams. It even tells you the % chance your team has to win after the balancing. Then based on that % chance and based on your personal skill rating, you have a specific amount of rating you can gain or lose from that match. Since it's based on your skill, it's probably a different amount from everyone else. If your team has a 20% chance to win, you would probably lose nothing at all.

Generally this keeps the matches close and fair, and most players have a win ratio between 40 and 60%, which is exactly what you should want.

Another bonus, not related to balancing but awesome enough to point out, is that the game keeps track of rage quits. You can create and join matches that specifically filter out people who have disconnected from a certain % of their games.

I'd like to see this system instituted in many more games, especially games like Left4Dead where imbalanced teams and rage quitting ruin 90% of matches.

I think that both the article and most of the obje...

2010-01-28T07:02:14.324-08:00

I think that both the article and most of the objections to it raised here are all valid (and nice to see the quality of comments improve here! - just how you get so many comments I don't know, sheer skill I guess - I admit I'm jealous ;).

I think the point is that different people want different kinds of levels of challenge in a game. Some want hard games for whatever reasons, including the status, and this will surely result in better games for those kinds of players due to the time & focus spent on that, as has been illustrated finely above. Also as has been explained above, people have quite an attachment to existing franchises and this includes the level and types of challenge they provide.

I'm going to talk about fighting games as that's my #1 niche, and there was (and still is) a lot of resistance to the fact the Street Fighter 2 "HD Remix" revision for XBox 360 & PS3 made just a few moves a bit easier to perform! (I've gone to town on why I disagree with that here - http://agoners.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/complexity-depth-and-skill-good-games/ Summary: it's still a flippin' hard & complex game, and its not just the execution complexity that makes it so). But the (re-)designer of was cognisant of the 'existing franchise' problem when he said: "There's only so far I can go with this and still call it SF2" (at the link below).

But at least it was very clear to any keen fan of the existing franchise who might be interested or not in this game title exactly what they were getting, as it was detailed copiously on the (re-)designers site (http://www.sirlin.net/articles/street-fighter-hd-remix-design-overview.html) and on the publishers promotional site.
But where I think this ideal of having "games for all types of challenge" (which maybe within the same game (easy modes) or in separate franchises) really falls down is that for many games the player really has no idea what they are getting into. Even a great demo (http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2009/01/why-your-demo-sucks-design-errors-and.html) may give you very little idea of the challenge level or types of challenge a game will offer. For a new player to Street Fighter who wouldn't seek out the design materials, what would they really know? I look at a title like Street Fighter IV, which was marketed as being "accessible to newcomers", and this was then repeated parrot-fashion by almost all reviews and all the press, when in fact, it is FAR more complicated and difficult to play than any number of older fighting games still (including Street Fighter 2), so much so that it alienates even me (a tournament player at HD Remix). How is a new player supposed to know that? In the end, I think Street Fighter IV shows the franchise (and fighting games in general) are heading the way of pinball if they are not careful. But again, the challenge is really for the marketing and reviews and media and such to actually clearly reveal the way a game challenges you and to what degree and how much any available difficulty levels change that. But that just doesn't happen right now! For example here on this blog is the first time I've seen that Bionic Commando Rearmed had an Easy mode that actually changed the platform layout rather than just giving me more lives (and I own the game!). I'm tempted to go and give it another play now.

As an aside, I also strongly disagree with the notion that competitive play and multiplayer versus style challenges are only for the 'hardcore' and such modes can't also have an "Easy" mode for players that want that, and I also believe players do want that (a lot of my own site is about this issue). In fact I think its much easier to do this in competitive multiplayer games than single player ones - it's all about matching players of equal skills (http://agoners.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/balancing-match/).
(sorry about all the in-line links, I don't know what code will work in these comments).

Hey Doc Prof, This is completely unrelated to the...

2010-01-27T07:18:02.498-08:00

Hey Doc Prof,

This is completely unrelated to the article, but may I suggest an idea for another article?

I live in Brazil, and there is one thing that really pisses me off about game releases: the release dates. The US always gets a game a few days sooner than the rest of the world, which doesn't make sense in digital distribution.

I bought Mass Effect 2, it was released on the US yesterday with preload available since sunday. But I'll only be able to play it tomorrow, the international release date and can't even preload the game.

Mass Effect 2 leaked online about 1 week before the release date.

So tell me Doc, why do the publishers complain about piracy so much when they aren't doing anything to provide a better service? Pirating a game is free, has no copy protection, and you can even get it before the release date sometimes.

Anyway, sorry for ranting here like this.

I used to love challenging games, but I'm not 15 a...

2010-01-26T18:20:49.597-08:00

I used to love challenging games, but I'm not 15 anymore. Gaming is a way to have fun and unwind after a long, stressful day. Developers that understand this are going to reach a larger audience.

@Andrew - Certainly it can be done, and many games...

2010-01-26T17:53:05.120-08:00

@Andrew - Certainly it can be done, and many games do it, but I'm just saying: It's not a trivial matter. You're right that most games implement those things you listed. But my point is, if a game didn't implement auto-aim or save games, they might have turned out as better games. Harder games, yes, but the gameplay might have been better because the one week that an engineer spent fine tuning auto-aim could have been spent on better monster AI.

Of course, that extra bit of quality may not be worth the alienation of more casual players. Who knows? It's a complex trade-off that shouldn't be trivialized. Game development is hard.

Let's take a recent example: Demon's Souls. Should they have taken the time to add a fall-protection feature (ie. game doesn't let you just walk off a cliff)? They chose not to. Was that the right decision? On the one hand, I bet tons of players got frustrated and quit playing because they fell too much. On the other hand, ignoring fall-protection gave them weeks of programming and design time to spend on everything else in the game. Was it the right decision? Who knows.

uhzHiro, I wasn't suggesting implementing all of t...

2010-01-26T12:07:39.667-08:00

uhzHiro, I wasn't suggesting implementing all of them out of context from the game, I think that goes without saying.

'Steven A.' why are you putting apostrophes around my name? Do you think it's a lie?

The thing is, the more complex games games are already developed with some of these things in mind and are clearly not developed as being "hard" games. So not only are "easy" modes less relevant they are already included in most cases.

A game like Megaman, which is designed to be hard, is considerably lower budget and only stands to gain from including an easy mode and opening up its audience.

Then you have games like Mirror's Edge which implement them then needlessly turn them off as the game goes on.

Anyway 7/9 is way over the top:
- Life/Health/Armour/Ammo

If your game has these systems in place this is not a difficult thing to implement, the fact that pretty much every FPS under the sky used to have cheats that gave just these things says it all.

- Enemy/Character Strength

Every enemy/character in a game basically has health and damage variables, is this such a difficult thing to change (Using most games as evidence, it's not).

- Auto-Aim/Targeting

At least on console games this is already featured heavily in lots of games.

- Checkpoints/Save Games

Because most games don't already have these as standard features.

Then two of the others depends entirely on the type of the game (Platforms/Guidance).

And again, I do agree that we need easier games to...

2010-01-26T09:54:37.732-08:00

And again, I do agree that we need easier games to expand the market. But it must be done with care, and it will be challenging for companies to find a good balance between catering to the (still very important) hardcore market while also expanding. It's not just a trivial matter of "oh, just add an easy mode and make million dollars!"

I side with uhzHiro here. I worked at 2K Games for...

2010-01-26T09:50:47.710-08:00

I side with uhzHiro here. I worked at 2K Games for one year, and I can confidently say that 7/9 of those things that 'Andrew' listed would take up significant resources and certainly detract from the quality of a more focused game.

And even if something was easy to implement (such as infinite lives/armor), you're forgetting one crucial aspect of game development: Play testing. Quality games require a ton of play testing - just ask Valve or Blizzard. If you make a different difficulty mode, then in order for it to be worth while, you'll need to play test it. To be really thorough about it, that doubles your needed play testing resources!

'Easy' is not free.

@ Andrew - you are vastly underestimating the cost...

2010-01-26T05:38:18.415-08:00

@ Andrew - you are vastly underestimating the cost and scope of your "simple" game adjustments. You're talking about -new- conditionals and calculations that have to be weaved into every facet of the game, and you're also suggesting entirely new mechanics that might not otherwise be in the game at all. As a software developer I know that you just added hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of time with some of those ideas.

Since game price is inflexible, content will likely suffer. That is mine and other folks here's argument, that easy mode development time and dollars decreases the value of normal mode content.

An amazing lack of imagination is out there it see...

2010-01-26T04:44:36.756-08:00

An amazing lack of imagination is out there it seems. There is no reason why a game that is designed to be hard would be impacted by the creation of an easy mode.

If the game is intended to be hard then the default state of the design remains the same and the easy mode will simply be created on top of the hard mode.

There are so many different features that can be implemented at a vast array of scales it's not even funny.

- Infinitive Lives, Health, Armour, Ammo etc.
- Guidance "Vision" highlighting paths/puzzle clues etc.
- Additional platforms
- Automatic Play, Level Skip
- Weaker Bad Guys, Stronger Good Guys
- More Time (quick time events/etc.)
- Auto-Aim/Targeting
- NPC assistance
- Check Points/Quick Save

That's just quickly off the top of my head and none of those affect the difficulty of the hard mode one bit.

Daniel Einspanjer, Russ Schampers and others worry...

2010-01-26T03:15:48.949-08:00

Daniel Einspanjer, Russ Schampers and others worry that the extra effort to develop an easy mode would raise the production cost of the game. Yes, it would... so what? The whole POINT of an easy mode is that it would open the game up to wider audiences. The incremental cost of adding the new mode should be less than the size of the added audience (not EVERYTHING changes and has to be rewritten and retested) so in theory this should LOWER the cost of games.

Also, thanks to Mark for the insightful comparison to "dumbed down Firefly". I'll really need to think about that one.

DP, nice article as usual. You've got me looking i...

2010-01-25T23:08:38.316-08:00

DP, nice article as usual. You've got me looking into and reading the status seeking behavior now. But I'm afraid I have to call you out for greatly oversimplifying the picture. There is another issue you're not really addressing -- a lot of gamers complain about easy mode for another reason. When one completes easy mode, one may feel the need to move on to a normal mode, and then to a hard mode. And it's a developer's best interest to cater *to* that desire. The result is an extended difficulty curb instead of there being spikes, because it's in the developer's best interest not to stonewall the progress of the audience.

One result of this is that the inclusion of an "easy" mode can result in "hard" mode becoming much easier. And if the new or casual gamers far outnumber the hardcore, and are more willing to spend money than them... guess who gets catered to? Hardcore gamers are railing partially because they feel like the games they played may be losing their identity because of this creep or trend. If you want another sci-fi show analogy, look at drastically Star Trek has changed in the last 15 years or so. A lot of oldtime fans (myself included) are quite alienated and don't recognize the show in its current form. Yes, hardcore gamers would PREFER their franchises dying than for them to mutate like this. I'm with them on that. Imagine if Joss Whedon was hospitalized and whoever took over Firefly instead homogenized it or changed it to be more like other shows. Would survival be a good thing?

At the same time, I'm not disagreeing with what you said. It's all true. In particular, I wish hardcore gamers would stop seeing a potential apocalypse and realize there will ALWAYS be insanely hard games for them, if they're not attached to a franchise or are willing to abandon it. The NES days did *not* have something like I Wanna Be the Guy or curtain fire shooters lik Touhou.

Oh my god, no. Mark's comment is not a good point,...

2010-01-25T22:27:52.656-08:00

Oh my god, no. Mark's comment is not a good point, it's not clever, and it certainly doesn't hit the nail on the head. Who are you people? You cannot make that parallel with this argument because it's simple apples and oranges. Mark's Firefly example is about censoring the mature content (violence, sexual themes, language) in order to make the show accessible to a wider audience. This article is about adjusting a game's level of challenge. The two are completely different concepts by virtue of the fact that the difficulty level of games is a status signal, whereas the content rating of a tv show (TV-G to M or whatever) has nothing to do with status and everything to do with the age bracket of the audience. There are casual and hardcore gamers in almost any age group. The content rating of a television show doesn't determine casual versus hardcore viewers. If anything, the analogous concept to match with gaming would be how well the viewer knows the show's content (as in trivia contests). So, no, trying to match the status symbol of game difficulty with the content rating of of tv show is not a "clever" analogy. Apples and oranges, man. Apples and oranges.

I do wanna add though, that this article is damn w...

2010-01-25T22:15:03.523-08:00

I do wanna add though, that this article is damn well-written and interesting. I appreciate how you bring other disciplines, such as economics, into the analysis of games.

I think Mark's comment hits the nail on the head. ...

2010-01-25T22:12:39.712-08:00

I think Mark's comment hits the nail on the head. Basically, yes, it is status signaling. And guess what? People really like status signaling. Look at the success of Xbox Live Achievements. Imagine if "Achievements" were made all trivial to get somehow - that would kill the experience and people would naturally feel gipped.

Also, it's not always free to add an easy mode. Depending on the type of game, adding difficulty levels can be very involved and use up a lot of resources - perhaps at the price of the overall game quality. As with anything, the more focus you have, the more quality you tend to come out with.

But I do agree completely that the industry - as a whole - must appeal to more types of players. But companies like PopCap and Nintendo have shown that you can do this very successfully by creating new IPs and experiences. There's no need to modify existing "hardcore" IPs. If a company chooses to do so, then they better be careful and do it well. We'll see how Mega Man 10 makes out.

@Partial Charge While infinite lives increases th...

2010-01-25T21:54:27.006-08:00

@Partial Charge

While infinite lives increases the likelihood that the player can complete a given task, that doesn't make the task itself easier. It just gives a persistent player more opportunity to improve. Maybe we're arguing semantics, but I don't think that really meets the spirit of "easy mode." There's a threshold at which a casual gamer gives up out of frustration. Infinite lives pushes that threshold further out (by making it easier for the player to retry); in my view, easy mode doesn't increase the threshold, it lowers the frustration level.

@Mark I think your Firefly parallel is clever but...

2010-01-25T21:04:13.626-08:00

@Mark

I think your Firefly parallel is clever but ultimately misleading. If someone tried to do that to a TV show it absolutely would have ended in tears. (Probably mine.) However, the analogy breaks down when you try to carry that over to video games, which are modular and flexible in a way that TV is not. As the good Doctor noted earlier, it might be tricker for a game like Zelda which contains different notions of difficulty. But I think it's high time developers started working on just this sort of issue. There definitely would be a cost, as you say, but it's not a given that it would be paid in product quality. FWIW, I also contest Daniel E's notion that implementing such difficulty scaling could double development costs. That seems like a drastic overestimate.

@Anonymous beginning with "Your article ignores a serious issue..."

You claim that Mega Man is an inherently difficult game, but I think that's just a failure of imagination. I played the crapcakes out of Mega Man on the NES and I assert that changing just one thing would have made the game far easier: infinite lives. I realize I'm treading on the challenge/punishment divide here, but it sure would have been easier to learn some of those killer sequences of deadly beams or spiky death pits if failing 3 times didn't kick me back to a title screen. Also, as DP noted, Bionic Commando Rearmed's easy mode simply added some platforms in certain locations, turning fall-die-reload sequences into fall-hop back-try again sequences. Bionic Commando and Mega Man are absolutely similar enough that this could work in some places.