polytourist97 on 23/7/2010 at 18:40
Quote Posted by Matthew
God forbid that people who aren't as good at games get to experience the whole thing, after all.
Of course they should get to experience the whole thing. So they should be able to set the difficulty to "easy" which gives them a more forgiving experience to start with, and if they get BETTER they are rewarded for it by being more successful, rather than being punished by the game having the difficulty scale with them. Then, if it ever gets too easy, they can take the next step and set the difficulty a little higher if THEY choose. Wouldn't that be more satisfying, even for new players?
I agree that in theory and on paper, adaptive difficulty sounds great. There is nothing objectionable to the idea of a difficulty system that is tailored to each player according to their own abilities. However, I don't think in practice it ever really ends up that way. For a couple reasons: the first is the same idea that I (and others) have expressed before about a game (program, algorithm, whatever) never truly being able to "understand" how a person is reacting to its content on an emotional level; the second is the inherent nature of how the system works. A game is essentially a set of rules which a player must figure out and play within to achieve a goal that is given within the context of those rules. With adaptive difficulty, those rules are always changing.
Matthew on 23/7/2010 at 19:21
Quote Posted by polytourist97
Of course they should get to experience the whole thing. So they should be able to set the difficulty to "easy" which gives them a more forgiving experience to start with, and if they get BETTER they are rewarded for it by being more successful, rather than being punished by the game having the difficulty scale with them. Then, if it ever gets too easy, they can take the next step and set the difficulty a little higher if THEY choose. Wouldn't that be more satisfying, even for new players?
No, because there is nearly always some section that is going to end up simply being too tough. Easy/medium/hard was fine when it was a matter of 'how do I get difficulty levels squeezed into 128K' but there's nothing wrong with trying something a little more adventurous now that we have the processing capacity to attempt it.
Papy on 23/7/2010 at 22:02
Quote Posted by Thirith
your argument consists entirely of rhetoric and doesn't have any substance any more
Fuck you. I gave plenty of substance. The only answer I got was some kind of religious faith in a wishful thinking theory.
You want substance? Then first try to answer how the game can know when I find something challenging or not. How can the game know when I'm bored or when I'm frustrated. Once you answered that, then we'll talk about how you can reward the player for his effort to make sure he keeps his motivation to play "correctly".
Final Lap adaptive difficulty made the game annoying. Oblivion adaptive difficulty (yes, this was a form of adaptive difficulty) made the game boring. On the other hand, Mission:Impossible, The Last V8 or The Sentinel, none of them having even a difficulty choice, were so rewarding that I still remember those games 25 years after I played them.
You want substance? Then quit YOUR rhetoric and bring substance yourself.
polytourist97 on 24/7/2010 at 07:19
Quote Posted by Matthew
No, because there is nearly always some section that is going to end up simply being too tough.
But adaptive difficulty doesn't solve that problem. There is still going to be some sort of baseline that any adaptive difficulty system can level down to, and that
should be the equivalent to an "easy" or "beginner" setting in a game. If upon reaching this baseline of difficulty a player is still having problems, what is the adaptive system going to do then? Start playing the game for the player?
And I would say that if someone is playing a certain game at its easiest setting and still having problem enough to actually consider quitting, then perhaps that game simply isn't for them. I know that's completely horrible and elitist of me, but I guess I'm the kind of person who understands that a third grader isn't going to get through War and Peace on the first try either. Better to keep reading something at their own level, and building up their reading ability before tackling more advanced entries in that medium.
Why are games treated differently? Why should someone of less ability expect to play more advanced games and be successful automatically when NO OTHER hobby or pursuit works like that?
DDL on 24/7/2010 at 11:14
Coz they're games, not hobbies?
Sure, you could view "attempting to get a K/D ratio of 1.0 or better in BC2" as a hobby (I guess) because it requires genuine skill increase on your part, dedication, and is multiplayer, so difficulty is other people, not something determined by the computer.
The majority of people play single player games for entertainment, and those people seem to generally view 'beating a challenge' as entertaining. Not 'tricking a game to remove the challenge', not 'being repeatedly kerb stomped by a challenge', and not 'cakewalk with no challenge'.
And I don't think anyone is talking about a truly fully scalable difficulty curve, as by that extension you'd have to have something still capable of providing an enjoyable shooter experience for a blind person with no arms. There will always be lower limits, so you can continue being happily elitist. :)
The problem here is that the 'pro-dynamic difficulty' argument seems to be that it CAN work, not that it always does, the anti argument seems to be exclusively that it WILL NEVER WORK, IN ANY SITUATION, EVER, and uses very specific examples of very ...well, unique playstyle in Papy's case. And constant references to oblivion, which has the least dynamic difficulty ever, and which could actually have benefited from some dynamic adjusting.
And the fact that there still seems to be a perception of 'the game going easy on you == reward', which is incorrect. Or at the very least, a dumb definition of reward.
Thirith on 24/7/2010 at 13:09
Quote Posted by DDL
The problem here is that the 'pro-dynamic difficulty' argument seems to be that it CAN work, not that it always does, the anti argument seems to be exclusively that it WILL NEVER WORK, IN ANY SITUATION, EVER, and uses very specific examples of very ...well, unique playstyle in Papy's case. And constant references to oblivion, which has the least dynamic difficulty ever, and which could actually have benefited from some dynamic adjusting.
And the fact that there still seems to be a perception of 'the game going easy on you == reward', which is incorrect. Or at the very least, a dumb definition of reward.
Ditto, except for the
Oblivion bit - I agree that the auto-balancing was stupid and badly implemented, but the discussion of whether it qualifies as dynamic difficulty or not strikes me as being solely about semantics, and few semantics discussions are worth the time.
Would anyone here in the "no dynamic difficulty ever, because it's a stupid, stupid idea" camp also argue against enemies that learn and adapt to the player, e.g. if the player always uses the same trick, they change their tactics? Because that is clearly an example of dynamic difficulty: the game reacts to the player having found a cheap way of getting ahead and adjusts the enemy behaviour so the game becomes more challenging. How can that not be called dynamic difficulty, other than pulling some "No true Scotsman" trick?
My point being this: there are so many different ways of making difficulty in games more dynamic. Some of them are silly and stupid, some are okay in theory but badly implemented. Some are potentially very cool features. Tarring them all with the same brush... well, I simply don't see how that makes any sense, unless you're willfully blinding yourself to what's possible. (And possible doesn't mean the same as "always the preferred option", by the way.)
Sulphur on 24/7/2010 at 15:46
Yep. Gotta agree with that. I have no issue with the idea of dynamic difficulty - if the implementation is rubbish though, you're going to hate it. If the implementation is good, it'll likely never stick out so much for you to even notice it. That's the way adaptive difficulty should work.
I don't get it, honestly. Between this and the body awareness thread in the Thief 4 forum, it seems that some people just don't want the shit they play to attempt new things, and would rather their experiences remain couched in stagnation. It's a rather strange state of affairs for a forum that's dedicated to LGS, a developer that constantly challenged the status quo.
jtr7 on 25/7/2010 at 04:01
Wrong. Adding in what many other mainstream games already do and have been doing is not challenging convention. :mad:
Get it now?
It's a damned irony supernova.
What LGS games did then is still something no one else does. It's not stagnation, but a challenge to convention that still runs against the grain to this day.
All the pop mainstream suggestions for an unconventional niche game are attempts to pack a shit-tonne of status quo into something never intended for it, and here we are, standing against status quo crap in games like Thief and being accused of the very opposite.
And then there's the other senselessness of profound compounded failure to notice the existence of many hundreds of posts suggesting and brainstorming new things kept mainly in the context of a Thief game, pushing the envelope of not just a Thief game (which is easy--just add mainstream crap--so not pushing it in that direction when possible), but challenging mainstream thinking at the same time. You are one of many who choose to not notice the movement to keep the LGS spirit alive in some fashion, and pushing to have just one more game in all of existence that is not like any other games out there except the trilogy, with new approaches to old Thief tropes and intent to give modern gaming tropes a Thiefy twist that makes a player think and be glad for it.
I sincerely hope you've at least noticed how many people have expressed over the years how they found the Thief experience spoiled them, making other games seem to fall short of that height. To make a new Thief game that only achieves, at best, a top-notch experience relative to the mainstream norms, but does not renew that sense of having one's paradigm shifted again, is not advancement of the genre, is not advancement in gaming, and is not great Thief. We don't want a great game, we want a great Thief game.
Sulphur on 25/7/2010 at 06:24
Welcome back, jtr. :D
I don't want to riddle this thread with things that belong to Thief 4 or muddle the current discussion about difficulty if there's more to be added, so I'll gladly take it to another thread if people want.
Addressing your points: adaptive difficulty and body awareness are decidedly not mainstream. They're not in every single console-spawned title you despise. They're not in many PC titles. They're different ways of doing something you take for granted.
You're not ready to even accept they could be potentially interesting because they weren't in your Thief/Deus Ex/whatever. That, jtr, is status quo right there.
All I hear is a lot of words like 'niche', 'mainstream crap' and 'we want a great Thief game'. I don't think you can make a high-budget niche game these days and sustain your company with that. And I don't think you have cause to generalise everything mainstream as 'crap', unless you've been playing uninspired shit like CoD2.
Yeah, I'm with you about Thief. Contrary to what you may believe, I'd love a great Thief 4. However, I'm not against people experimenting with the formula. I don't think these things are mutually exclusive.
Briareos H on 25/7/2010 at 08:19
Experimenting is not only a good idea but it is required for EM games to be successful.
And whatever the way you choose to word it, body awareness is not experimenting, since it is not something no one has ever done.
Anyway, I can't believe we're still discussing adaptive difficulty. In games with deep player involvement, the mental model of the world & mechanisms must leave no place to changes you can't acknowledge fully. Introducing a feedback loop is the best way to piss the player off as an expected behaviour will induce a new set of rules that could hardly be anticipated, at least when influencing higher level variables.
Adaptive difficulty is a good idea when providing a tailored experience, for example in a cinematic FPS where you don't care about how the player wants to play and what they learn. It has absolutely nothing to do in a deeper game where people will want to learn fixed mechanisms. Period.
Oh wait, we're talking Deus Ex.
