Forgot what made me think about this topic but I’ve been considering this for a week or two… Curious what you all think.
When I mean “hardest” “video game”, I mean whatever game that you find objectively more difficult than all other ones on the market, as long as it’s a video game. I guess exposure to different genres/types of games can influence the answer to this question a lot so… Hence I was curious about your rationale.
I have a pretty solid answer & rationale but I guess I shouldn’t share that in the main post to bias results…
There are so many kinds of difficulty that this is hard to answer.
There’s fake difficulty, where the game is just being cheap. Some games are hard because their mechanics or controls are just janky.
Some games are easy to lock yourself out of the ending and not know it. Try the game from the start again!
There’s genuinely difficult games, but any time a game is difficult in a “fair” sense, there are people on the internet who’ll beat it with a guitar controller, or blindfolded, or without any power ups.
If you want a game that not many people could beat…I don’t think many people could beat Bokosuka Wars today…
Precisely. There are games where random factors like a particular loot drop, or doing well in an early battle thanks to random critical hits, or a good randomly generated starting point all determine if the game is reasonably beatable, or if you end up softlocked.
There are other games with certain, let’s says pranks, played on players with one hit kills that can only be avoided with foreknowledge. In modern games, at least these pranks are made shortly alter save points or there is a Dark Souls like way to regain equipment/progress. In a lot of older games, the player is forced to restart a big chunk of the game. At that point it becomes a test of patience rather than skill to replay the same level over and over.
Then there’s games like the original “pirates!”. It has an anti cheat that would present itself as a simple question like “do you recognize whose pirate flag that is”. The answer is in the booklet, and if you answer wrong nothing visible happens but the difficulty is cranked so high that the game becomes effectively unbeatable.
A lot of games made in the 90’s were difficult. But that’s before entitlement struck the gaming community and the “I need to beat this game in a weekend” turds were dictating how games turned out.
Games made in the early 90’s were made for cartridges and floppy disks with limited memory and couldn’t contain a lot of content so difficulty was used to increase playtime.
Nice theory, but no. Just look at WoW as a perfect example. When it launched in the early 00’s, overland content had a bit of a difficulty curve to it. It was clearly intended to be somewhat challenging overall.
Other MMOs that followed had the same thing. ESO being a perfect example. In many places, and I recall it well- just doing side quests was risky. LoTRO is another good example.
Then over the years, the player base whined and the developers caved in to appease what was and still is called: “the care bears.”
The vocal majority of players that got tired of the grind and the difficulty, and whined their way into changing the overall feel of games to be winnable under the easiest of circumstances, and the last amount of time.
ESO is a soloable joke of a game and WoW is a cartoon. Now, difficult games are a niche novelty.
When an MMO launches it normally has little content and uses difficulty to pad playtime, especially subscription MMOs like WOW and pre-one tamriel ESO. Typically an mmo reduces difficulty of old content over time, when new content becomes available.
I do agree that the effect is much more pronounced the more popular a game is. LoTRO at least added some of the overworld challenge back with an optional difficulty slider after community backlash, and I’m not sure that a less niche game would have bothered.
With all due respect, I think that a load of excuse mongering. Everyone knows that casuals complain to developers all the time. And that they get their way because they threaten to quit/cancel their subs.
This isn’t a giant secret. It’s pretty well known in a ton of games.
Polybius I forget what I’m doing while playing.
Resident evil revelations on inferno difficulty is just unfair.
