Comment I could have written, almost:
Anyone working in the AAA industry on any level who thinks Demon Souls / Dark Souls are examples to be followed or praised should have their head examined. Honestly, wake the f**k up. If you’d like to set the progress core gaming has made as a form of primary mainstream entertainment back 20 years, make more abominations like Demon Souls and Dark Souls and market them to the core audience.
Let’s drop the pretense that Demon Souls / Dark Souls are games designed to challenge, because they are not. They are gamified masochism simulators designed to appeal to the .01 percent of the people in the world with Self-Defeating Personality Disorders a.k.a. masochistic personality disorder. Which shouldn’t surprise or shock anyone since Kei Hirono, the producer of Dark Souls freely admits the games are masochistic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cctSOnxkmc&feature=related
I mean, my god… what the hell is going on within the industry? Stop pandering to less than 1 percent of the audience and stop throwing flowers at the feet of a development team the entire industry and the gaming press should condemn.
And Margaret Robertson, no joke… if you’re not already, get yourself into therapy before you hurt yourself or someone else.
The game industry is fascinated by Japan’s game culture where the craziness of spending dozens, hundreds of hours on a game designed to make you his bitch is part of the appeal. Because you feel good after ruining three gamepads in front of your TV, alone. Pleasure is a lot about bragging about what you did in the game rather than what you actually did, repeating over and over and over some actions. Navigating awful, disgustingly unpractical menus and sub-menus. Hundreds, thousands of times.
First, I think it’s lazy design. Fine tuning difficulty means touching a lot of stuff -level design, mechanics, UI usability- and it’s complicated to do that. It’s re-designing, basically. It’s easier to stick to a design and just move variables up and down. Japanese game development is known to be extremely rigid and probably pushed game developers to continue the tradition. After all, one of the goal of making a computer game is to get people to play it over and over.
People get hooked on difficulty or infinite grind. Of course, when you spend four hours trying to beat a boss and that you finally do it, you’re happy. You know, you die and then you find the weakness and then you beat it and then the boss has a second phase and you die and you learn the weakness of the second phase and then you have to perfectly do the phase 1 and 2 etc. I fucking hate this shit. Maybe I’m too much of a designer but I “read” their intentions as “let’s artificially bump up the time you spend on this game”. Even the “boss” concept is lame at that point in the history of computer games.
Let me be clear, I think it’s pretty cool when you are a kid. You learn what failure and commitment are and I think computer games are really good at that. You just restart by pushing a button. But as an adult? Fuck that, I want to entertain myself, not get desperate and cry angrily.
When I play, I want to enjoy the experience, it’s the core of it. I like challenges and get better, no problem. Get stuck by incredibly masochist design decisions? Fuck you. I’m playing a game. It’s not supposed to bring me stress. Adults swim in stress in their lives, why the hell would they want more of it?
Stress induced games are fine, as long as they are… Multiplayer. The game I played the most in my life is probably Counter-Strike and it’s hard and stressful, you die a lot. But there’s this psychological powerful thing that you can reverse that. You can die in the first seconds as you can kill the five opponents by yourself, with a lot of luck. All these RPGs, third-person brawl single games force me to do something a certain way and penalize me for every single other way. That sucks. It’s a fascist approach. There, I said it.
What’s interesting is how the game industry polarizes and embraces insane difficulty on one side (Dark Souls), super dull challenge on the other side (Uncharted 3) and the middle ground, a mix of both in a sandbox (Skyrim). It shows how much easier it is to polish a design for one single group of people, hardcore or softy rather than design a large spectrum of challenges. I guess you have to listen to your fans, too. But as games grow more and more as services, they need to expand their audience and developers need to be more flexible about their designs. WoW is still a king in this respect. Mixing a couple with one playing hardcore and the other casual in the same game and in the same room, is a huge achievement.
Did I mention that making games is hard?