I can attest that today’s games are much easier than previous generation’s games. Playing Super Mario Bros. 3, from the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, on the Nintendo Wii is much more difficult than playing Rayman: Origins, a platformer released last year on the Xbox 360. I couldn’t even beat the first couple of stages in Super Mario Bros. 3, yet I am able to stroll through Rayman: Origins. But why is there a difference? Both are 2-D side-scrollers and only make use of two motions: jumping and moving. If there is a differentiation between these two, seemingly similar games then should there be a push for more difficult challenge. And if so, when does a game stop being fun and shift into frustration?
On January 19, IGN U.K. released information on a new mode for Bioshock: Infinite dubbed “1999 mode.” “It’s essentially a tougher version of the title where players' choices have ‘permanent consequences’ in the game and modern-day features such as frequent respawn points and an abundance of ammo have been stripped out to increase the challenge.” The mode is purely optional and affects the gameplay of Bioshock: Infinite in a significant way. In an interview with the IGN editor Charles Onyett, Ken Levine, creative director for Bioshock Infinite, said that, “if I want to be a pistol guy, that means I can't be a machine gun guy as well. When I find a machine gun, I'm going to suck at it.” Typically, in first person shooters, the player is able to master any type of weapon that is picked up so this mode included in Bioshock: Infinite subverts modern video game conventions.
But the fact that this mode is separate from the main game and the standard difficulty is noteworthy. Games that are strictly single-player, such as Bioshock: Infinite, are trying to tell you a story and want you to play to the end. Batman: Arkham City has a mode, after the main story is completed, called New Game Plus. This mode removed any indicators from the enemy that they were about to attack you and enemy positions were changed to increase the difficulty. As games become more and more accessible to people who have never played games before, I can see this “increased challenge mode” becoming a regular in the world of single-player games. You might be thinking to yourself, “But don’t games already have Easy, Normal and Hard modes? Why would they need more than that?” I counter with the fact that harder-difficulty settings usually increase the damage of the enemies or give you less life. The 1999 mode and New Game Plus change the structure of the game entirely.
But when does a game straddle the line between fun and frustrating? AMY, a downloadable game, has garnered some negative reception due to the game’s difficulty, poor presentation and frustrating gameplay. The developers spoke out on their Facebook page and criticized the players and reviewers. “As many of you already heard, AMY is a HARD game… We believe this is part of the survival experience we tried to build, as we wanted the game to be challenging. However, we actively listen to the community and comments and hence recommend the non-hardcore gamers to launch the game in EASY mode for now.” This really confuses me because I can be considered a hardcore gamer but when I played the game on Normal, the controls were unresponsive, the checkpoints were consistently awful and the combat left me pulling my hair. That has nothing to do with the difficulty; it has to be blamed on the game’s design flaws.
Send me an email at shfawcet@asu.edu with your opinions on difficulty in video games.
