The Flavor Savior

Yin and yang, as above so below, nirvana through samsara, et cetera.

“The Jailer is the key...”

Of late, I've been seeing more and more articles ostensibly written by sensible, professional game journalists decrying the ‘fad’ of making indie video games unfairly difficult, decrying the masturbatory ‘prepare to die’ marketing of certain titles.

For contemporary examples, refer to:

http://www.zero-friction.net/2016/02/12/indie-devs-lets-take-a-hard-look-at-how-your-hard-game-may-not-benefit-you/

http://www.zero-friction.net/2016/04/01/hyper-light-drifter-and-the-growing-problem-of-indie-games-being-too-hard/

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/03/31/hyper-light-drifter-impressions/

http://kotaku.com/indie-boss-battler-furi-is-the-wrong-kind-of-hard-1783130485

Yes, those first two links were written by the same individual; no, it’s not my intention to pick on him.

The argument surrounding difficulty can be summed up with the mention of ‘prohibitively steep difficulty curves/spikes’ and ‘poor balancing’. Upon its release, Hyper Light Drifter received some criticism, especially in regards to difficulty and its frame rate. Certainly the complaints regarding FPS are overblown; however, I can at least agree that 60 frames per second is objectively better than 30. Game balance meanwhile, has and always will be a nebulous, subjective concept.

For some amateur reviewers, “game balance” has turned into something of a shorthand for the old, reliable “I’m not bad at the game, the game fucking cheats”. Rather than practicing and improving, one is content to (rage)quit, citing game balance. I have a friend who certainly doesn’t consider himself a ‘hardcore gamer’, who was able to complete Hyper Light Drifter more or less on release, despite leaning towards less reaction-heavy and more strategy-oriented games in the past. This isn’t a matter of ‘being good’, this is a matter of ‘being patient and learning from mistakes’.

At one point, the amount of straw manning a sensible writer is willing to indulge in stops reading like thoughtful deconstruction of opposing viewpoints and veers closer to insecurity or dissociative personality disorder.

 [Regarding Hyper Light Drifter] “Well. A very early boss fight took me 15 deaths to finally beat it, so I’d say… oh… maybe at level 20, dying about 500 times repeatedly, doing the same thing, should show good, smooth pacing and be adequate to show that it gets smoothly more difficult“.

 Gee Mr. Game Design Critic, you read me like an open book, that was exactly the argument I was about to make after perusing your treatise.

Another method of undermining your arguments, taken straight from the pros, is getting offended over things that don’t particularly warrant it and venting at your readership.

 [Regarding Furi difficulty settings] “Although ‘Promenade’ isn’t significantly easier than ‘Furi,’ it does offer you more lives. You’re shamed for picking it, which made me wonder why it was included at all. Really, you’re not only shamed for picking it as much as you’re shamed for being the kind of person who would pick it: ‘Anyone will be able to enjoy the universe and the story, but the game will be much shorter and very easy. Does not unlock trophies, the Furier difficulty and the Speedrun mode.’”

 So did the Furi devs piss in your Cheerios or something? Are you going to get upset over the Human Revolution idiosyncratic difficulties of ‘Tell Me a Story’, ‘Give Me a Challenge’ and ‘Give Me Deus Ex’ next?

There is a market for challenging games, they aren’t some splinter niche that you can smugly dismiss as a “vocal minority”. In the early 90’s (which I can’t claim to have any nostalgia for since I didn’t play very much at the time), the game you purchased did not owe you a victory as a consumer. Arcade titles were designed to be difficult—often unfair—to wrench as many quarters from the player’s hand as they could in the half-hour of gameplay they might offer. As games emerged on home consoles, the mentality remained; difficulty was a method of artificially lengthening gameplay for a title that might otherwise be found lacking in content.

Many of those who grew up with titles like Contra or Mega Man or Castlevania are working adults now, with disposable income. This is part of the reason we see nostalgic Kickstarter campaigns like Shovel Knight or Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, or Pillars of Eternity do so well nowadays.

Indie games can’t be viewed on the same terms as a Triple-A blockbuster. Indie games are created on a lower budget, and are appealing to a niche by default. Less funds diverted for production also grants an indie title more freedom, because it now has a substantially lower sales figure to meet to be deemed “profitable”. Triple-A titles need to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, whereas indie games do not, and bless them for it.

The "indie games are too hard" argument also patently ignores that there's no shortage of more forgiving independent titles out there. Freedom Planet has a functional suite of difficulty options as will its upcoming sequel, SUPERHOT is a quality first-person action puzzler that isn't particularly demanding, VA-11-HALL-A is a more relaxed, pseudo-visual novel. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night seems to be aiming to emulate the difficulty of traditional Igarashi Castlevanias with some success, judging from its E3 demo. And despite my personal misgivings with the title, Undertale is doing quite well as a more casual-friendly experience. There's a host of others besides.

More challenging titles are usually tagged as such, so as always it's up to the consumer to do some cursory research and avoid the titles that may not conform to their tastes or comfort level. Is the "prepare to die, casual gamers need not apply" marketing obnoxious? Admittedly yeah, it can be. But there is no longer an excuse on the consumer's part that they didn't know what they were getting into. All of this taken into account, I'm not sure that I see what the actual problem is.

It’s hard not to become a little jaded with titles like Fallout 4 (which I actually quite like, honestly), where the game becomes a cakewalk a couple of hours in, and turning up the difficulty does nothing for execution except throw more bullet sponge enemies at the player, and turn up damage received to 200%. Indeed, the difficulty selection for most mainstream titles presently is absolute rubbish, the only immediately noticeable changes are to the spreadsheet of damage dealt-to-damage received ratios. When I can envision the statistics governing how many inches of airtight Kevlar is wrapped around the head of a dime-a-dozen mook, I’d rather play on Normal or Easy.  

“Once in a blue moon they convene at their seasonal wine-tasting banquet to talk smack about heroes and labor unions.”