Insane Difficulty: The 10 Commandments of Gaming - Insane Difficulty

10. Thou Shalt not have release day DLC. If it is just graphic shit, like different outfits for the characters, then whatever. But don't put additional content behind a money wall the day it comes out.

9. Thous Shalt have skippable cutscenes. Maybe I died. Maybe this is my 2nd (or more) playthrough. Maybe your story is fucking terrible, and I just don't care. Regardless of the reason, if I want to skip the cutscene, let me.

8. Thou Shalt have local multiplayer, UNLESS you don't because of hardware limitations or a specific and good game desing reason. I'm going to talk about exceptions here, because I don't play multiplayer games. But i do know some game sthat should dont support local multiplayer, so people have to buy more games and consoles. GTA and Saints Row get a pass, because I assume running that open world on 2 screens is unfeasible. Dark Souls and other FromSoft games get a pass as well, partly for the same reason, and partly because I believe that there isn't voice chat and the like to prevent hardcore co-op, where you can plan with you team and trivialize the game.

7. Thou Shalt not be overly long. 40 hours is generally how long my attention span is for a game, only broken by a few exceptions. If I play the game for 40 hours, and am only a third of a way through, Jesus Christ (I'm looking at you, Bravely Default).

6. Thou Shalt have likable characters. Like, holy shit, I shouldn't even have to say this. If you've ever played eternal sonata (if you haven't, don't), the characters are all awful. The only remotely interesting character is Frederich Chopin, as the rest are all the "don't ever do anything bad, no matter the circumstance" type of character you see in shitty cartoons and anime. And apparently, Chopin's "I'm not a complete pussy goody two shoes" style was evil enough to make him the end boss. I'm not sure how it all goes down, because Eternal Sonata breaks almost every god damn commandment on this list and is awful, so I stopped playing. But I know the only likable party member is the end boss.

5. Thous Shalt have interesting bosses. Bosses with a gimmick to beating them is fine, as long as the gimmick isn't obvious and you have a gimmick for every fight. Lost Odyssey is the biggest fucking offender I have ever seen for this. There are like 2 bosses you actually fight, then its "Hit the crane! Kill the orbs!" Imagine the boss you fight during the blitzball tournament in FFX, the machine on the ship. Now imagine 50%+ of the bosses being like that.

4. Thou Shalt not have worthless status effects. Don't make the hit rate to put an enemy so slow for every enemy, that I have a better statistical chance of killing it before I land a sleep. Don't have basically every enemy immune to every status worth a shit.

3.Thou Shalt have dialogue I can get through at a reading pace. What I mean, is when the characters speak, there should be subtitles. And if a press A/X then i should skip the voice acting for the rest of that subtitle, and it should go to the next. Video game voice acting is very hit or miss, and sometimes I don't want to listen to the fucking voice actors for 5 minutes to know what the hell is going on. This is the entire reason I stopped playing Mass Effect 1. I didn't want to sit in a dialogue with a shopkeeper for 5 fucking minutes before I could even see their inventory.

2. Thou Shalt not have unlockable difficulty settings. If I want to play the game on a hard mode, don't make me earn it. What if I play the game on a new platform, for whatever reason? Now I have to replay the whole game just to get the mode I want? Fuck that.

1. Thou Shalt have a challenge. In this era, where most every game has difficulty settings, it is inexcusable to not present a challenging experience. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and Ni No Kuni are the most severe offenders of this commandment that I have seen. Ni No Kuni has an easy mode and a normal mode. Why no hard? Seriously, if you put in different difficulties, give me a hard mode. Normal will have some close calls, and maybe a handful of deaths, but the game is so good, I'd like to replay it with a semblance of a challenge. Kingdoms of Amalur is just embarrassing, tho. It has a hard mode, but the hard mode is ridiculously easy.

Some counter-arguments. I had a big post ready and accidentally closed the window, losing the post so this will be shorter.

9. Some games use cut-scenes as a mask for doing some other processing or loading or whatever. If this is done frequently some players would get more frustrated that the game appears to be arbitrarily not letting them skip certain scenes.

8. Assuming this one is for games that already have a form of multiplayer. Lots of games just wouldn't function well in a local MP environment, especially ones made entirely for PC. Imagine playing Starcraft 2 on PC in local MP. In addition, local MP can sometimes take a good amount of work to make work properly and without too large of performance hits, and would force the dev to sacrifice dev time on other aspects of the game in order to make a mode that is often not used. For example, local MP is rarely played on PC. That being said, stripping local MP out of AAA games, especially from series that had them before, is a very obvious money grab. Make it so you can only play MP with that person if they buy the game (and console, if applicable) and it's lame.

7. Why 40 hours? Before I had a steady income I was determined to get all the hours I could out of the game. I have 7 games on my steam where I'm listed as over 40 hours of playtime (Crusader Kings II: 652 hours, Europa Universalis IV: 207 hours, Space Engineers: 58 hours, Planetside 2: 57 hours, Portal 2: 57 hours, Terraria: 53 hours, Kerbal Space Program: 45 hours) and I also have over 20 hours in Pillars of Eternity and haven't gotten through very much of it. I also have over a year logged in on WoW. Designing games to be finished in that short of time make the game a worse value proposition to players. What I think you're actually arguing for is "No excessive padding", which I'd agree with.

2. Unlockable difficulty settings, in theory, allow the developers to make the hardest difficulty settings even harder because then the higher difficulty settings can assume that you already have a solid grasp of the game mechanics. For better or worse, certain games are marketed toward people that would jack up the difficulty right away and then complain loudly when they get their asses handed to them.

I agree with most of these whole-heartedly, but there are a couple that I personally don't agree with.

7. For the most part, it doesn't bother me if a game is long unless it feels like the game should have ended already. And if the game is good, I'll rarely feel this way. However, I generally stay away from games that *don't* end. I'm not really interested in LoL or the like for that reason. I like local multiplayer games for when friends come over, but if the entire focus of a game is on online multiplayer I'm usually gone.

1. This can probably apply to RPGs more easily than other genres. For example, making a hard mode that is actually challenging for Kirby games is probably not going to work as smoothly given the games' design, and I have no problem with that. Personally I don't really care though; if the game doesn't have a hard mode I make my own.

9. I hadn't thought of that... But whatever. If it is a short scene, it's fine. Don't make a 5 minute cutscene before a boss unskippable. I used to have that fucking speech Riku gives in KH1 before he reveals he is possessed by Ansem memorized because I saw it so many damn times as a kid.

8. I actually mentioned those reasons to not have local multiplayer. Maybe I phrased it badly, but there are exceptions to that one. But a first person shooter, or a fighting game, or really any console game designed for multiplayer? Put in some damn local multiplayer.

7. "40 hours" is just my personal threshold for how long I can play a single player game. In one playthrough, anyway. I'm not saying you can't play a game for more than 40 hours (hell, the last 75 hours I've played of any game was all in Dark Souls 2), I'm just saying that beyond that point, a game starts to feel bloated for me. It's not a hard and fast number, just don't be like Bravely Default.

2. People complaining loudly is never a reason to do something. Giving in to the demands of the loud and angry minority inspires people to complain loudly. If you buy a game, play on the hardest difficulty, and can't beat it, you have 3 options. Stop playing, tone down the difficulty, or be a fucking idiot and complain about shit you did to yourself.

And, to Lock:

If you have difficulty settings, it is inexcusable to not have a challenging difficulty setting. I probably should have put something in that commandment specifying difficulty settings, but whatever. If a game is made to be easy, and has no settings for difficulty, then whatever.

7. Yeah, so you're arguing against padding. I agree that padding isn't the best, but just going "long game = probably bad" is also not good. I also now realize that most of the games I'm over that time on are games that don't have a specific win condition or with a lot of replay-ability. Interesting.

2. It is a reason for business to do it. If too many people do it, they complain and you risk losing sales on your next game. While I agree with your sentiment from the standpoint of a logical player, from a business standpoint you don't want to risk having a player's first exposure to a game be one that they hate because it's too hard right off the bat. Even if the difficulty is because of them picking it.

Nowea, on 05 March 2016 - 06:49 AM, said:

Yeah, I'm arguing against padding. I said "overly long" which was my way of saying "too long for what you have." There are games that can keep me engaged for more than 40 hours (Dark Souls, FFT 1.3, I think I spent 55 hours on my first Ni No Kuni playthrough), and some games have a less than 40 hour timeframe. Bioshock Infinite took me about 20 hours the first time through, and that was a great length. Spec Ops: The Line is about 5 hours long, and that was the perfect length for it (which makes it sound bad, but it is very good).

Also, I don't think too many people are not going to buy a game because some asshole on the internet said "Super Ultra Face Fuck Mode" was too hard. But, this isn't a thread about business decisions, it's about game design. And unlockable difficulties are bad game design.

Thou shalt not have difficulty settings based only on statistic changes to enemies. "All enemies have 300% more HP"

I can get behind most of that list, and especially point 7 & Hart's little addition. Nowea does have a point with some games needing unlockable difficulty though. Mega Man Zero is one series I can think of where it's probably a good thing. Just beating those games can be difficult for many people; maintaining an overall A or S rank is yet more difficult, yet required in 2 of the games to get everything (partially). It's probably a good thing that Hard Mode is unlockable there, especially since Hard Mode takes away options.

Hart-Hunt, on 05 March 2016 - 07:03 AM, said:

Honestly, this doesn't bother me. A lazy hard mode is better than no hard mode. I would kill for extra life and damage on enemies in Ni No Kuni.

Doesn't bother me too much either, especially in RPGs since "just up the numbers" can make mechanics that were minor before into something more dangerous (like imagine hard having poison tick for 2x or 4x damage when, at 1x, it's relatively minor)

That being said "Just up the HP" for many enemies would be boring.

Yeah, if it's just hp, then it sucks.

Kjata, on 05 March 2016 - 09:22 AM, said:

(cough) Metroid prime 3 (cough)

11. Thou shall not enforce mandatory tutorials.

12. Thou shall not have unlockables/rewards which are unlocked purely by fake difficulty/longevity.

13. Thou shall not value extrinsic motivation over intrinsic motivation.

*glaring at you, Mario Maker*

14. Thou shalt make a game and intend for it to be fun, rather than simply a profit stream.

Fully agreed with most of the points on the list.