Divinity and Difficulty
One of my coming-off-the-holidays games to play is Divinity: Original Sin 2. It's got a lot of complexity to it, and I don't think I'm more than a third, so any sort of final review will have to wait. It's got some ups and downs. It's also made me think a lot in the last day or two about difficulty in video games.
Most games, video or otherwise, are meant to involve some measure of challenge. And in the earlier days of video games, difficulty was a good way to bait more quarters/tokens. Learnable patterns, however, provided a means of getting better at a game.
Things have come a long way, and the experiences have evolved. A lot of video games that follow a story (be it an RPG's script or a linear, but unscripted, experience) can be played through in a way that involves minimal failure, with only the hardest or most surprising moments requiring a reload. Keeping up the flow of the game helps maintain immersion in the tale being told.
There are still some that are difficult by design. I feel like you can go a few ways with that that are "good." One focuses on the gameplay challenge itself rather than the story - so called "bullet hell" games tend to be more about the accomplishment of mastering the patterns of the game than progressing through a story. The other weaves the death into the story - games like Dark Souls make failure something to avoid if you can, but a completely acceptable part of the process because the character is effectively immortal anyway. Games like XCom take a slightly different approach where failures can be played through, becoming part of the player's experience without necessarily halting the story.
D:OS2 feels a bit like the worst of both worlds in regard to difficulty. I started the game out on the default difficulty (2 of 4) and it's genuinely hard. It's a deeply tactical game when it comes to combat, but it isn't very fair about it. There are a great many tricks and combinations that can be pulled off in the system, but there's very little to teach a player that short of encountering them by random (often when they are used against the party) or looking things up outside of the game. Several combat encounters change along the way, so even if you play things out for certain conditions, those plans are thrown out the window if you get far enough along.
And while it's easy enough to save/reload, getting to a failure point in a battle can take 20-30 minutes. That breaks the flow in an RPG where each party wipe is a "oh, that didn't happen" sort of interruption to the story, especially in a case where it might happen repeatedly. I haven't reached "walk away from the computer fuming" levels of frustration, but I do feel like the untelegraphed twists in difficulty make the experience worse.
Maybe I should have tried the lowest difficulty setting?
Most games, video or otherwise, are meant to involve some measure of challenge. And in the earlier days of video games, difficulty was a good way to bait more quarters/tokens. Learnable patterns, however, provided a means of getting better at a game.
Things have come a long way, and the experiences have evolved. A lot of video games that follow a story (be it an RPG's script or a linear, but unscripted, experience) can be played through in a way that involves minimal failure, with only the hardest or most surprising moments requiring a reload. Keeping up the flow of the game helps maintain immersion in the tale being told.
There are still some that are difficult by design. I feel like you can go a few ways with that that are "good." One focuses on the gameplay challenge itself rather than the story - so called "bullet hell" games tend to be more about the accomplishment of mastering the patterns of the game than progressing through a story. The other weaves the death into the story - games like Dark Souls make failure something to avoid if you can, but a completely acceptable part of the process because the character is effectively immortal anyway. Games like XCom take a slightly different approach where failures can be played through, becoming part of the player's experience without necessarily halting the story.
D:OS2 feels a bit like the worst of both worlds in regard to difficulty. I started the game out on the default difficulty (2 of 4) and it's genuinely hard. It's a deeply tactical game when it comes to combat, but it isn't very fair about it. There are a great many tricks and combinations that can be pulled off in the system, but there's very little to teach a player that short of encountering them by random (often when they are used against the party) or looking things up outside of the game. Several combat encounters change along the way, so even if you play things out for certain conditions, those plans are thrown out the window if you get far enough along.
And while it's easy enough to save/reload, getting to a failure point in a battle can take 20-30 minutes. That breaks the flow in an RPG where each party wipe is a "oh, that didn't happen" sort of interruption to the story, especially in a case where it might happen repeatedly. I haven't reached "walk away from the computer fuming" levels of frustration, but I do feel like the untelegraphed twists in difficulty make the experience worse.
Maybe I should have tried the lowest difficulty setting?
Two games I have been playing recently have been built along the lines of: "Difficulty results in player death until they learn patterns and maybe some caution." Both Nioh and Cuphead are hard. Deaths right now in Nioh feel "cheap" as any significant fight (say against a boss) is a 2-hit and I'm dead affair. Couple that with the game's version of Stamina (Ki) and when you run out, you can't evade and if you block you're going to be staggered and even stunned (The character stands still, defenseless, panting for breath) Cuphead is a shoot'em up cross platformer mostly composed of creative boss fights where you have to learn the various attack patterns to maneuver around, all while dealing out a near constant stream of damage yourself (Though there's no timer I am aware of for bosses getting harder if you take too long to beat them) however, since it is almost entirely boss fights, "progress" is binary. You either beat the boss, or you didn't. Bosses do have various phases at least to keep the fight interesting, but each phase means having to learn new attack patterns, often when you only have 1 hit left. It seems unfortunate that the Divinity developers felt the game needed to have an increase in difficulty over these strategy focused fights over the course of the game. Maybe walking away for a while will help
ReplyDeleteSee, we were considering getting Original Sin - this speaks against us getting it, then.
ReplyDeleteI can't say for sure if it's for you. I don't regret buying it, and I'm invested enough to see it through (unless I hit even more serious roadblocks). Also, I don't know how much the lowest difficulty setting changes things...
DeleteI just feel like they could have made the fights less difficult and the elements of the fights less obscure (elemental/status interactions and untelegraphed changes) in order to cut down on "necessary" reloads to help with narrative flow. Or they could have revamped things into a more XCom-like affair which has all the tactical combat focus, but you can lose and learn without having the reload the game. In both cases, I think the game would have been objectively better.