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Gone Gonzo  Posts: 2713 Joined: 7 Feb 2008     | |
BANNED  Posts: 302 Joined: 6 May 2008    | The dead rising time limit thing was bullshit, reminded me of Pikmin. Thankfully the GTA on foot has been fixed so I have no problems with that. I totally concur with you! have a cookie User was banned for: Random answer generator request and also do you have any eccentricities?. (Permanent) |
Copy Clerk  Posts: 88 Joined: 10 Dec 2007  | Do games that blatantly cheat count? Pro Evolution Soccer is definetly a contender there. You'll be winning quite comfortably until the computer either... 1) Gives itself a free kick in injury time and scores, sending a player off in the process |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 2713 Joined: 7 Feb 2008 | I would say that blatant cheating counts, I just don't play sports/racing games where that shows up in the programming so I have no criteria to judge them. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 4491 Joined: 23 Dec 2007     | Like when an easy AI Star Wars sniper one in a billion happenstace gets a perfect headshot on you while flying at high speed. Inside an X-wing. |
Copy Clerk Posts: 88 Joined: 10 Dec 2007 |
That's an impressive shot to say the least. :/ |
Muckraker  Posts: 242 Joined: 14 Jan 2008  |
I didn't think that Dead Rising's time limit was that bad. As long as you didn't try to save everyone, it was totally possible to get the good ending on the first go-around. |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 2713 Joined: 7 Feb 2008 |
The part I got stuck at that really pissed me off was Steven in the Super Market, where they barely give you enough time to run across the goddamn mall let alone get stuck anywhere. The timelimit was too damn short for that bit. |
Press Junketeer  Posts: 385 Joined: 12 Sep 2007   | Interesting thread. I like the term "artificial difficulty". Even though all games are completely artificial by nature, I think it's pretty clear what you mean by it. I take issue with a couple of things though.
Ammo scarcity is another word for "resource management". Nothing artificial there. You have a limited amount of resources (bullets) and you have to make the best possible use of them. Strike a balance between careful aiming and quick shooting. Don't use shotguns on a lone enemy unless the situation is desperate. Manage your grenades judiciously.
Serves you right for playing it on a console instead of PC with mouse and keyboard. :P
So. Annoying. The fact that you can't anticipate or deal with those problems except by repeating the missions until you get lucky is what really burns. Though somehow the phrase "artifical difficulty" doesn't seem to apply here. It seems like random screwage, rather than something the designers deliberately put in. I wonder, is it useful to make the distinction? Anyway. My least favourite is AI cheating in RTS and TBS games. I remember playing the original Civilization on Emperor level, and I couldn't understand how my neighbours were managing to grow their cities so damned fast. Eventually I sent in a diplomat to spy on their production and realized that the food and production icons were oddly staggered in their respective boxes. The AI only needed 1/6th the food to grow its population and 1/6th the production to construct its buildings and military units. I turned the machine off and have never enjoyed the game quite as much since. THAT's artificial difficulty for you. AIs who always antagonize the player and rarely antagonize each other are also irritating. Let 'em win or lose on their own merits, the lazy bastards. |
Copy Clerk Posts: 57 Joined: 16 Oct 2007 | Everything by CryTek. How are you supposed to play Far Cry like a stealth shooter if everyone in the map has super vision and can see you at 6 miles away? To add insult to injury they of course have perfect aim. |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 2713 Joined: 7 Feb 2008 |
Valid Criticisms! Your pretty much right about Resident Evil 4, the reason why I mention those is because they skirt the line, sometimes it feels like resource management, but sometimes it seems like they want to suck your bullets to increade difficulty. And Ashley is one of the more well designed escort missions around, but I feel all escort missions are just an excuse to make the game harder. In regards to the GTA bit I feel that, as they do in Saints Row, the cars should be tougher and the missions shouldn't run on such a tight timer. If you get blind sided, which 50% of the time you do, the designers should anticipate that and the enemy should be slower as a result, or you should be given more leeway in picking up their trail after you recover. The problem here being that if you get hit by a random car, launched even slightly off of the chase route, hit one wrong pedestrian/police car your basically done for and a 50% random failure rate is not good. |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 2713 Joined: 7 Feb 2008 |
Or in the same vein how any guard in Oblivion can magically sense you when you perform a criminal act. Or how Cops in previous GTA games can find you no matter where you hide? Sometimes even teleporting right behind you? |
Beat Writer Posts: 211 Joined: 2 Apr 2008  | Agree about Oblivion's guards, and how come the game gets harder the more you level up? The general monsters get bigger and tougher. I can understand this in the high-level quests, but the everyday monsters? It just feels unfair that as you get all this ability to cut a rat or goblin in two with a single sword stroke or lightning bolt, you stop having to fight them and get bloody great minotaurs and bears as standard instead. Note - despite gripes like this, Oblivion is still a great game, and the only one I've managed to finish in the last few months! |
Beat Writer Posts: 211 Joined: 2 Apr 2008 |
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Beat Writer  Posts: 155 Joined: 25 Mar 2008 | A lot of capitol offenders have been cataloged here: But with that link hopefully placing you deep in nostalgia here is my most hated/favorite Bullshit AI moment: Mario Party. My friends will hoot and holler to no end when they win, and bitch for hours when they lose. Keep in mind that winning and losing is complete fucking chance in Mario Party unless you're actively trying to lose. |
Anonymous Source  Posts: 9 Joined: 13 May 2008 |
any of those, or when a weak cross goes into the box, hangs in the air for an eternity, and then the computer ALWAYS seems to win the header, this happening mostly during the early days of master league |
Press Junketeer Posts: 385 Joined: 12 Sep 2007 |
It is a fine line. The designers have to balance the number of enemies they throw at you with the muntions they provide, so that you'll succeed or fail based on how well you use what you've got. Sometimes that means hitting you with enemies that are massive ammo sinks. If you managed your stuff well enough, you can win. If not, you're toast. If there were always enough ammo to get the job done without having to worry about it, it wouldn't be a survival-horror game.
If she wandered around at random like the citizens driving the streets in GTA, I'd agree with you. But she stays right behind you wherever you go unless you tell her to stay put. If she didn't keep her head down when the bullets start flying, if she didn't come straight to you when you call her, if she didn't take every reasonable precaution to stay out of the line of fire, I'd call artificial shenanigans. But nope, it's an honest-to-goodness challenge keeping her safe. You have too much control for it to be otherwise. I'm not sure if giving extra time in GTA when blind-sided is the way to go; keeping the streets clear of meandering idiots during certain missions would probably work better. I mean they do it during the racing missions, right? |
Paperboy  Posts: 27 Joined: 7 May 2008 | IMO, Dead Rising is the biggest offender of this I've ever played. I mean, to quote Yahtzee, there's something wrong with a katana that breaks in five or six hits. I realize, the developers don't want you wielding around so=me uber weapon for an unlimited amount of time and just killing everything, but come on! With the sheer number of zombies, and the difficulty of actually getting a fucking katana, you should be able to slice through at least 100 before you have to go back to throwing TVs! And the bosses are total bullshit also. |
Press Junketeer Posts: 385 Joined: 12 Sep 2007 | Okay, so. Rubberbanding in racing games. Artificial difficulty? |
Paperboy  Posts: 21 Joined: 11 May 2008 |
I hated MK64 for that. :\ Get the fastest kart and use a mushroom, and the other kart, no items, stayed right beside me. Fail. Also, the Oblivion guards thing is why I prefer Morrowind, I prefer to be able to wreck absolutely everything (except maybe the god, he was tricky) once you reach a certain stage of awesome. I thought Wii Sports (although this is more a rubberband issue) did this well with the score balance, except the difficulty curves are non-existent in Tennis and insane in Baseball >_< |
Press Junketeer Posts: 385 Joined: 12 Sep 2007 |
Well, what do you expect from a "katana" you found at the mall? Not exactly Hattori Hanzo. Besides, the need to continuously seek out new improvised weapons is part of the whole zombie apocalypse schtick, and making the weapons disposable allows for differentiation in danger level between areas. So areas rich in weapons are safer than places like, say, the food court. Ugh. Challenging, but not cheating. Unlike, say, the stuff on that page The Franco was kind enough to link us to. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1197 Joined: 10 Nov 2007 | |
Infamous Scribbler  Posts: 511 Joined: 22 Dec 2007 |
Another troper here on the escapist? :) |
Paperboy Posts: 27 Joined: 7 May 2008 | I have to respectfully disagree. You have any idea how much you have to go through to get that stupid thing? You have to work between missions to go to only one store on the second floor in the middle of fucking nowhere! And the sad part is, yeah the katana kills in one hit, but knives that kill in 2 or 3 last longer than it! And if it's sharp enough to actually cut through bone and sinew, than obviously it is a high quality katana, so I have to disagree with you on that point also. |
Pulitzer Laureate  Posts: 816 Joined: 6 Feb 2008   | Three words; "Fucking Blue Shells" (quote stolen from xkcd.com) |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 2128 Joined: 7 Mar 2008 |
the thing that bugged me about san andreas the most was the cheating the computer could do in the races. i ran a couple of the cars off the cliff and still had to hit all the check points to win the race but the cpu cars didn't have to do that cept for the targeting the cops being there ads to the fun of it and the randomness makes it a bit closer to real life |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1068 Joined: 25 Feb 2008 | It had to happen sooner or later so... Most of the levels are filled with spamming/regenerating one-hit-kills-you oponents. Fine until you realise there are more of them than you have amunition for and the best way to progress is simply to run past them and rely on luck. Its not an issue with broken controls or gameplay, just lazy design. But by far the worst offender is Need for Speed underground 1 & 2. You would be driving a perfect race, leading by a good 20 seconds in the last section of the last lap. |
Beat Writer  Posts: 152 Joined: 5 Apr 2008 | This is sort of tied in to the ongoing debate about MBS on the Starcraft 2 forums. For the uninformed, MBS is Multiple Building Selection, mechanic that isn't in Starcraft, is in Warcraft 3 and may be in Starcraft 2. Opponents of its inclusion in SC2 say that having to click more to create many units of the same type increases the amount of skill required to play the game and is therefore vital in making SC2 a successful competitive game. Those in favour of MBS say that this is utter bollocks, as you aren't fighting your opponent, you're fighting the interface. I'm for MBS, and as such am of the opinion that its absence would be a perfect example of artificial difficulty. |
Paperboy  Posts: 39 Joined: 13 Oct 2007  | The Pokemon games are massive culprits of this. The Gym leaders and Elite 4 have this amazing ability to make their pokemon hit with stupidly powerful, but innacurate moves every time. |
Anonymous Source Posts: 6 Joined: 7 Dec 2007 | What, no hatin' for Prince of Persia? Talk about cheapest enemies ever. They wait specifically for you to launch into one of those ridiculous five-minute-long combat animations. Then they stack 82 enemies on top of you for no reason. Having a shit-ton of enemies is not upping the difficulty. It's just upping the cheese. |
Copy Clerk  Posts: 98 Joined: 30 Apr 2008 | I stopped playing super mario galaxy about 24 stars in when it became clear the only enemy in that game was the camera. Another artificial challenged is any game that has snipers that can kill you in one hit. You'll just be walking along then just fall over dead, you'll run back try to find the sniper only to fall over dead again, this goes on for 4-5 saves before you finally find the guy. At least HL2 was nice enough to have the red lazer thing to show you there was snipers around |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1140 Joined: 16 Jan 2008   | Oho, the COD series are guilty of this! Especially COD 3. On vet, rather than just die quicker, the enemies will utterly ignore any friendlies that might be spread right across the map, standing up in plain view, and shoot the 1 square inch of your prone form that just wiggled faintly into sight over a tussock, hurl more grenades than they have digits, and open fire with their homing freakin' bullets at you. It drove me nuts. |
Beat Writer  Posts: 182 Joined: 31 Jan 2008 | Star Wars Battlefront. When I up the difficulty I expect all the AI to get better not just the opposing side, and leave my side running round like headless chickens. |
Definition:
Artificial Difficulty is the term I use to describe a game that makes itself harder through means which will more often annoy the player than give them a good sense of challenge. Usually this type of difficulty involves enemies or situations which take advantage of crummy controls simply to make the game FEEL harder. Overall, Artificial Difficulty is annoying and frustrating instead of Challenging and Rewarding.
Examples of games that are (for the most part) the GOOD kind of challenging.
Gears of War: Tactics and Skill win the day (except for the whole Driving/Solar Gun section, hella Artificial Difficulty there)
Resident Evil 4: Shooting Ability and Decisions are important (though ammo scarcity fits into Artificial Difficulty territory, as do escort missions).
My Worst Offenders List...
1) Grand Theft Auto (1, 2, 3, Vice City and San Andreas): The controls suck, the cars are too weak and the autolock frequently targets the wrong foe. You often end up dying four or five times on a mission because of something stupid, like a random car drives into the intersection during a crucial car chase and destroys you, or the cops are in the wrong place at the wrong time while your doing a mission and you get a 3 star rating like that because of it. GTA has too many random elements and while they do increase the difficulty, the frustration is much greater than the fun. These are not good challenges, these are ANNOYING challenges.
2) Dead Rising: The time limits are too fast, the nighttime zombies are tougher for no reason, the rescued people are stupid but the WORST thing they do is this... The control system is designed to fight slow moving enemies (a.k.a. Zombies) but to make the boss fights harder the bosses are fast moving people who for some reason are WAY faster, more agile and have better aim than you, hence making it REALLY hard to aim/hit/defeat them using your super-slow zombie fighting moves, you lose due to crappy controls more often than to any actual strategy by the bosses. Also time limits, what the hell? As if this game wasn't hard enough anyway.