Videogame Difficulty: The Definitive Review
I am easy, like Sunday mornings.
One of the very best things about the generational march is that once you get older, your priorities shift. Everyone who has completed certain life milestones will complain about children removing your marathon play sessions, of how gaming time dwindles from entire weekends into mere slithers of time snatched here and there. I feel very lucky to have established a slot on Friday nights where I get three whole hours in a row! Perhaps the biggest consequence of this is my diminishing tolerance for bullshit. I have no fucking time whatsoever for dawdling ‘I’ll tell you on the way’ mission briefings and I have even less time for narrative exposition. And I certainly don’t have time to be fucking around with things that are ‘difficult’. I harboured such guilt for not finishing Demon’s Souls1, but it turns out I just cannot give a fuck about games where the progress comes from brutally small increments in levelling and the need to deploy by-rote discipline in combat. The game beat me by inducing boredom rather than intimidating me into cowardice. I watched quite a few Souls series speedruns and I think you have to admit that when people are speedrunning every single game in sequence without taking a single hit, the difficulty may be less about skill and talent ceilings than you’d initially assume. It seems that with the knowledge and the discipline, they’re actually quite exploitable - the resource required, aside from collective knowledge2, seems to be patience, so perhaps demanding is a better adjective. And there’s the next-gen title: Demanding Souls3.
It’s funny to watch Danmaku pacifist runs4, which rely on boss timers to end the stages instead of the player’s violence, and seeing that the difficulty here comes from sensory processing and ultra-fine motor control. Or literally skill and talent. You see, given enough time, I think I could probably learn everything required to do finish any given Souls game. I’d hate it, but it doesn’t seem wildly beyond my biology, even if it is beyond my temperament. A pacifist run of any Danmaku5 shmup? No fucking way. That seems on a par with winning GT Academy or coming top-three in a Virtua Fighter tournament. “OK, Boomer”, I hear Millennials cry. Funny that I regress to the three most archetypical and archaic videogame genres to try and prove my point, yet it’s interesting that mid-late Millennials, the most ardent demographic of the Soulsborne fanbase, would have likely skipped the entire 8-Bit home computer experience altogether. The ascendant Generation Z critics and tastemakers are even more removed from the era where games came broken, unbalanced and unfair as standard. No continues, no saves. And for me, that’s largely the point; I’ve paid my dues across a plethora of £1.99 cassettes and scaled a few 80s shmup 1CCs, and I did that with raw trial and error combined with dogged determination. Namely the resources required to persist through any given Souls title. I can’t be fucked today because I crossed that Rubicon decades ago and have nothing to prove, either to myself or anyone else6. To add, only the late millennials would have missed Ninja Gaiden7 on the Xbox, which I’d say is a starting point of the modern ‘real games are hard’ movement for which the Souls games are given the most glory.
I bashed my head against Ninja Gaiden for quite some time. I hugely respected its combat system, which for the first time made you really feel like a supernaturally excellent ninja. Chopping, somersaulting, charging-up, decapitating. Fucking. Yes. Two years on from the PlayStation 2 reincarnation of Shinobi, an effortlessly cool game that let you feel a bit like supernaturally excellent ninja but with a whiff of puzzle counter-intuitiveness souring the cocktail, Ninja Gaiden had a wild, rapid intensity that seems in quite a contrast to the generally more considered and slower Souls approach. But it also had boss fights. Fucking loads of them, which again is something I just cannot give a fuck about anymore. The raw, burning glory of Ninja Gaiden came from Ryu Hyabusa going apeshit in a tight arena against a mob of two-hit killers, not having him rolling about to avoid vast skeletal talons and flying bones for ten fucking minutes of chip-damage boss disposal. Likewise Bayonetta suffered the same problems in my eyes, although it wasn’t as much of a bastard and those goddamn Sega references pulled me through. But by the end, I was thoroughly done with Bayonetta, to the point where I had a very mild argument about boss fights with the glorious Rich Stanton on this blog’s predecessor. In hindsight, I should have gone hard on how wonderfully fun God Hand made its bosses, being nearly all enemies of a similar stature to Gene rather than facile, grandiose colossi without any of the style, nuance and sensitivity of Ueda’s Colossi.
The key generational difference shines when you want to define difficulty. What is the measure by which others are judged? For me, the gold standard has to be Jarvis and DeMar’s Defender. That game is simply fucking hard. Its control method is demanding to master. Its challenge is immense. It scales to outright cruelty with quite some pace. If you want to get the world record on it, you not only have to be astoundingly skilled at the game, you require serious endurance. In contrast, Asteroids record-chasing revolves around shooting everything until there’s one solitary pebble onscreen and then popping off flying saucers as they emerge, occasionally thrusting to avoid the lone pebble. Do this for enough days and you’re the winner. The challenge is pure endurance, with little skill required. Eugene, it seems, has a tenacious grasp of skill demands, being something of a masochistic Robotron player himself8. But even Robotron pales to Defender at its most aggressive. And yet, the best of the best manage to pull off runs of temporary dominance that are extraordinary, if sporadic9. At the highest setting, no human has been able to dominate the machine totally. And they’re definitely not doing a no-hit run to 20 million points. Losses are part of the grand struggle, because this game is actually difficult. I’m not sure how Millennials or Gen-Z would choose a game to define their standard of difficulty, but I’d love to hear suggestions from them.
With the passage of time and the slow decay of ego comes the realisation that better times can be had at lower difficulty settings. I first got stuck into the easy-to-start methodology by playing Koei’s Musou titles, where full story runs on the easiest settings are a total blast that leave you with plenty of unlocks, nicely-levelled characters and stacks of very nice weapons, setting the stage to ramp up the challenge to reap faster XP returns and better drops when you switch to chaos. The Musou grind and its irresistible momentum towards increasing efficiency is one of videogaming’s most overlooked pure pleasures, but the key fact here is how it allows you to do this at your leisure. And therein is the operative word. When you abandon foolish pride and can overcome the social shaming, switching to easy brings the notion of leisurely play to the fore. It’s a bit of a shame that the Souls games can never truly be leisurely easy, for that would be a betrayal of the penitent, sedulous nature of the Souls grind. So because I’m happy wallowing in the filth of the casuals, I’m not privy to the gorgeous worlds of those games. But this is no great loss to me; I value the time retained far more. Some friends were incredulous that I was humping about in Ghost Recon: Breakpoint until I’d exhausted all the content, but that was because I’d easy-grinded all the gear and skills to make stupidly fucking hard difficulty10 an absolute riot. I would have never got there if I’d attempted the long march on anything that represented an actual challenge. Instead, I leisured my way to that point where I could turn all the dials to 11. Play easy, play smart, have a richer experience is my motto here. It echoes again in Starfield, where I have just unlocked yet another seam of infinite assassination missions, this time from a far darker place than before. The leisure here I’ve already expounded upon, several times. And no, it hasn’t gotten old. In fact, I just finished the Concealment skill challenge and got max rank. 10x damage on stealth melee!
So when thinking about difficulty, just consider that dropping the difficulty slider is merely upping the leisure factor. I have to make a plea to game designers to think of their created worlds in leisurely contexts; what richness can you bring if you neuter challenge, but still look for how to make things fun? Is there a hidden wonderland to be coaxed out if we stop paying deference to the ego of the overly-competitive player and the bankruptcy of hard-for-hard’s-sake? Can we redefine the brag of dominance and victory, of vainglorious material success, to the brag of simply having the most fun? Can the next Grand Theft Auto be about having a nice time on holiday in Florida? Could Call Of Duty do a shlock alien invasion instalment involving the ludicrous slaughter of vast alien mobs using District 9/Elysium Blomkamp weaponry? Go on. It’d be such a laugh.
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I marvelled at the peerless atmosphere and sheer richness in the fantasy concepts, but there’s just so much pain for such little, little gain.
Collective knowledge, of course, is beautifully implemented and player-accessible within the game itself in Demons Souls.
It’s a fuckload better than ‘Elden Ring’. I hope I’ve been flippant enough that an entire toxic fanbase will assault me via extremely angry comments.
DoDonPachi TAS pacifist run right here:
Much love to Pearl. 1CCs on every Cave shooter. 1CCed Batrider, Garegga et al. Madness. Their most recent world record involved five hours playing an obscure skiing game. Fucking brilliant.
Had an moment of cruel schadenfreude watching someone attempt to review a shmup in order to make themselves look knowledgeable as a legit games expert. They used the term 'danamaku'.
Perhaps I should add that I fought through Dooms I and II and a suite of taut tactical FPSes before the turn of the millennium, so ‘being there’ and ‘doing that’ at peak difficulties was already old hat to me. I completed System Shock, you fucks. YES, THE FIRST ONE. YES, INCLUDING THE CYBERSPACE BITS. And Master of Orion. And fucking UFO: Enemy Unknown. But not Ultima 8. Now that was fucking H A R D, just for the jumping. But hey, I can honestly say without a shadow of a doubt that I harbour no insecurities at all about this topic and have absolutely nothing to prove.
I would actually submit Devil May Cry as the progenitor here, but it wasn't punishingly hard by default.
Stop what you’re doing and watch Eugene beautifully describe the arc of hardcore Robotron play and the peak flow state. From the Williams Arcade Classics CD-Rom. It takes “an hour or two” of being absolutely battered by the game to get warmed up.
This is what I’m talking about. ‘Mikeville’, spanking Defender while Defender spanks him on 99-99 difficulty. Just watch the dance - and see the survival instinct shine within the savage attrition. Amazing grasp of the utterly quixotic controls. This is 20+ years of play in action and the sheer boldness with which he takes on multiple baiters (the game’s most challenging enemy, which spawn specifically to hunt you down) is breathtaking.
Also note the fluidity of his reversing; Defender has a button dedicated to it, but it has imprecise timing and variable behaviour. It shifts the craft to the opposite side of the screen as well as changing direction, so the player has to be able to account for that spatial translation on the fly. This can be a big risk when there’s a lot of bullets and enemies in the immediate playfield. The timing of when the move executes can be variable too. A busy screen delays the execution. And there are baiter strategies that involve double reverses, reverse+thrust overshoots and so on. The key point to note is Defender is surprisingly complex at this level. For more info, including the controls, look no further than Doug Mahugh’s book on the game.
Breakpoint had a faintly miraculous rebirth that, as with last week’s piece, I will be writing about, with some force, at some point in the future.