Hard Times - Why Difficulty Sucks

[GamerMan316]

Hard Times - Why Difficulty Sucks
This one goes out to anyone who chooses Normal without a second thought...

Question: Why don't you play games on Hard? It's not because you're a wuss, I can see that.

You've got the dirty glint of a born killer in your eyes, not to mention those boxy shoulders and the spindly murderer hands. No, you play games on normal because you like the challenge it offers, right? It's nice. It fits. Well, what if I said choosing hard meant more than just punishing yourself? What if I said it meant playing a whole new game, one you might want to be playing instead?

It might seem like a weird thought, but it shouldn't be. Everyone remembers how the original Halo morphed into something deeply special the moment you put it on Legendary, turning from a fun ride into something slow, tense and deeply tactical. Well, to a greater or lesser extent, most games change like that, it's just not signposted at all. Instead we get sentences which are equal parts zen and totally useless like "Normal: This is a setting for guys who enjoy playing videogames", or "Dangerous: For players who know their way around a pad!"

Take Far Cry 2. What's ordinarily quite a lightweight open-world shooter becomes an entirely different animal the second you put it on Infamous, the hardest of the four difficulty settings. The actual changes are tiny- the AI become competent shots and, crucially, their bullets actually kill you, yet that's enough to change the game utterly. The only way to survive is staying behind cover, skulking through grass, killing when you can and running when you can't, which turns the large open-plan compounds where missions always take place into simple puzzles. You arrive at them, pop out your monocular and memorise the locations of turrets and ammo caches, you plan angles of attack, ways in, even ways back out. Finally you take a deep breath, flex your shoulders, grip the pad and move in.

Not only is it as tense and exciting as anything available on the 360, it's more in-keeping with what Far Cry 2 was trying to do with the FPS genre. The adult, intelligent dialogue and inclusion of first-aid, fire, disease and weapon degradation are all there to provide you with a shooter that's as realistic as possible, so realistic combat fits perfectly. The game is amplified.

Red Faction: Guerrilla is a similar story. The game's relentlessly telling you that you're not some supersoldier, you are a poor outgunned guerrilla, yet that makes zero sense when you're playing on normal or casual because the guy you're playing is a supersoldier who can run around soaking up the bullets while calmly walking back and forth breaking the spines of an entire base full of soldiers with his big hammer.

But on hard? On hard it becomes the game it says it is. When you're trying to place demolition charges in a base and you notice your minimap is full of enemy dots advancing on your position, you panic. You need to finish leveling the building, but you need to get out of there now. More than that, when you do manage to defeat something like a convoy it's enormously satisfying because you actually are a poor outgunned guerrilla. Hostage rescue missions, cutscenes, fleeing from the scene of the crime, everything in the game that tries to tell you that you're an underdog starts to work, because you are. And it's not even that hard, not compared to anything from the SNES era or before. It's just a matter of being patient, smart and keeping a enough fear inside you to remember to run.

Turn It Up
With an increase in difficulty both of these games become far more dramatic, interesting experiences more suited to their tone, experiences that plenty of gamers would rather play than the equivalent game on normal if they only knew it was an option.

But there's a problem here, a really bizarre one that no-one in the games industry's covering. As you progress in both of these games, the action ramps up in scale. By about half way through either game, they've become unplayable. Not just hard, but physically unbeatable. It's hinted at by the fact that neither game has an achievement for beating them on a certain difficulty. That's because no playtester could reliably do it.

It's horrible. Not only does the beautiful time you're having melt away in front of your eyes as you slowly start dying more, swearing more and having less fun, and not only is your persistence only ever rewarded by that eventual mission which is so hopelessly unfair you'll never do it, but it highlights just how little the developers have thought about the mode you've come to love. In Red Faction you end up repeatedly murdered by enemy soldiers who spawn so close to you that you can see the red pips appear on your minimap with no explanation, and in Far Cry 2 enemies become so dangerous that every setpiece has you swapping down the difficulty so you can survive the unavoidable hailstorms of incoming fire.

It's still completely worth playing the opening half of either game on hard. There's nothing else quite like them. It's just important to know that the brick wall that's waiting for you before you get there.

Of course it isn't always the case that developers phone high difficulties in. Gears of War 2, Left 4 Dead or Halo 3 are excellent examples of games where enough thought has gone into difficulties, they're just very different.

If you haven't tried either, here's a brief explanation- rather than being driven by story, the appeal in these games is mastery of the mechanics. Legendary mode in Halo 3, Expert mode in Left 4 Dead and Insane mode in Gears 2 are there to be attacked once you've already finished the game, and instead of existing to immerse you they're there as mountains waiting to be climbed.

How these games change is more subtle. Again, the only thing within the mechanics that's different is stronger enemies, yet the result isn't simply a demand for quicker reflexes. These games demand discipline.

To use simple examples, Gears 2 on Insane will kill you if you leave cover for a couple of seconds or let enemies flank you, and Left 4 Dead on Expert will devour you the moment you split up from the group or miss a friend's cry for help. You're no longer playing, you're seeing if you're worthy. If you want the ultimate accolade of beating these games on hard you (and your friends) need to know exactly what you're doing and you need to actually do it, without fail, every time. More rounded than simple tests of skill, these games are about patience, teamwork and knowledge of the game, and they're incredibly rewarding as a result.

A logical assumption would be that if the one thing all of these games do have in common is increased tension, survival horror games would benefit the most from a bump in difficulty. Well, that might be true, but you'd be hard pressed to find a genre that screws it up more than this generation.

Resident Evil 5 on Veteran is almost there. By limiting the ammo available to you and making enemies stronger, more resilient and more aggressive the game is in theory taking the right steps towards making things spookier, but all it does is highlight that Resi 5 is an action game in the first place. The emphasis is still on killing all the Infected in an area and turning it upside-down for treasure before you move on; the core of the game is still entertaining combat. It just gets harder.

Oh Oh
And there's a bigger problem. Unlike the fine-tuned, precise combat of something like Gears of War, Resi 5's fighting is sloppy. The AI of your co-op partner never impresses, but will let you down. Enemy attacks are hard to read and will often hit you from around corners or out of your line of sight. Worst of all, the game has dynamic difficulty so if you do manage to do well in one area, the enemies in the next area will be tougher. All of this adds up to something which is mathematically annoying when it tries to make itself 'harder'.

I don't even want to talk about Resi 5 on Professional, the unlockable difficulty above Veteran. It's moronic. A single hit will put you in dying status and the enemies are so aggressive that chickens will attack you. You beat it by starting with the best weapons and restarting the game after every checkpoint to buy more healing supplies.

Dead Space on the other hand makes a blindingly obvious mistake on Hard that all developers would do well to learn from. It takes a game where most of the fun comes from the satisfying pop of severing alien limbs and it... increases the number of shots required to sever alien limbs. The combat instantly feels more weightless and less entertaining, the game thoughtlessly removing the single feather it had in its cap.

It's a crime. Dead Space could have become the horror game it set out to be, Red Faction: Guerrilla style. If ammo and monsters were made a little more scarce, if enemy attacks were a little more dangerous and enemies moved just a little faster, you might have something that gets the player highly strung enough that they actually jump at every shadow and sinister thump. But this time around it wasn't to be.

It's frustrating, not for the games that could have been or that games that exist that no-one's playing, but because this is something we can't cover it in every review. It's hard enough to find the time to finish a game once, let alone twice. So it's up to you. Become the brave new explorers of this new frontier.

Besides, this is the generation where sinister publisher analysts can watch our every move through data gathered on Xbox Live. Just by changing the difficulty you're giving them something to think about and becoming one more reason for developers to spend the time on Hard mode our games deserve. So no more messing around! Step up to the plate, open up the menu and make the going get tough.

[nCogNeato]

The only time I play a game on the hardest difficulty is for the achievement.

If a game has 'stackable' achievements, I'll play it on the hardest difficulty during my first playthrough (Halo, Gears, Batman, and now Army of Two 2).  That way I can relax during additional playthrough for collectibles, kill counts, etc.

[GamerMan316]

I'm the same especially with rentals, I didn't do that with Arkham Asylum though I only borrowed it, I usually start games I own on normal then attempt the hardest setting, on World at War & MW2 I started on Hardened for the 90/100 point achievements then went through on Vet, same with both Gears games too.