Was in a comment section about designing games to respect the player’s time and mentioned I never finished Hollow Knight because it makes you fight the final boss again each time you want to give the secret boss another shot.
Someone jumped in literally telling me “GET GOOD” and when I told them there were other things I’d rather be doing, they followed up with “so don’t get hard games just to complain about.” They never responded when I asked them how I was supposed to know exactly how hard everything in the game would be before I ever played it.
Every fucking time. I swear I can set my watch by it. The Dark Souls series has earned my undying enmity for what it has done to gaming discourse.
I mean doing it fast is one kind of difficulty, I actually think some of the more frustrating ideas about what makes a game a satisfying experience is that difficulty is a monolith.
There’s speed of execution, perfection of execution, study, memorisation, self exploration, exploitation of systems, persistence, reaction speeds, planning, strategy, tactics, coordination, parsing a game, pattern recognition, and of course many more and any permutation of any of these.
Chess is “difficult” but chess is (until an elite level) also just very easy and boring. Depends on who you ask and how they’re approaching it? Do they seek to master the game without studying anyone else’s play? Extremely difficult in some ways but no reaction speed required. Do they want to spend hours of their life drilling and studying? In some respects that easier but it demands extraordinary persistence and tolerance for tedium.
Is COD less difficult than chess? Depends on if you have arthritis I suspect.
At least personally I am never looking for a game that requires fast reactions or play but I adore games that require remaining calm in the face of challenge and not making any input mistakes at their highest levels. I also love games where you have to fill notebooks to solve them. Do I not like difficult games because I will never speed run?
Difficulty is so fuzzy that when it comes some way of ranking “real gamers” or whatever the conversation just devolves into calling each other names and erecting random goalposts.
The non-shitposting version of my post is that every game becomes hard when you have a challenge run of that game. Some easy platformer becomes super hard if you are trying a no damage run. It doesn’t matter if the base game is easy or not. Every RPG becomes hard when you’re trying a pacifist run or a naked run and so on. Besides speedrunning, there’s also stuff like 1cc runs for arcade games, which is beating the game without dying, pacifist runs, no damage runs, and so on. Each type of challenge run tests for something different, and speedrunning for that matter differs depending on genre. Speedrunning platformers focuses on frame perfect execution and twitch reaction while speedrunning RPGs with RNG focuses on memorization and being able to adapt to both good and bad RNG. They’re completely different.
My point is that git gudders almost never speedrun or do any other challenge runs, which is what you would expect from people who actually want a hard game experience. They mostly just play the base game, which isn’t even that hard especially when compared to a challenge run of an easy game, before shitting on people like the OP for not wanting to put up with various design choices the game has.
I am of the camp that game devs should give players the tools to make the game as easy or hard as they want it to be, whether it’s through cheat codes or making the game easy to mod. Challenge runs should be build within the game as options.
So we broadly agree but all speedrunning/challenge runs are things you do playing a game repetitively.
My point is that “difficulty” (I don’t actually like that term for reasons like this) also encompasses stuff like when a game is first approached. I love dark souls (1, fuck the others) and everyone knows it so as an example your first play through is difficult, not because darksouls requires any particular skills to play but because it’s very strange. Back in 2010 or whatever games without objective markers and stats explained, hell games without a compass or map, were uncommon. So playing it was genuinely quite difficult because it is very opaque.
Learning the language of a game can be challenging, can be really challenging! But none of that challenge is replicated on repeat playthrough. Someone looking for that would not find anything satisfying in a challenge run/speed run/whatever. So maybe some people who say they like difficulty like the blind exploration and learning kind, rather than the others. They might not be full of shit, just wrong about accessible design.
I think it’s hard to genuinely go into a game blind, especially when you consider genre conventions. It’s not like the 90s where you can play a (non-platformer and non-shmup) game that is one of the first of its genre, so you literally have nothing, not even genre conventions, to rely on.
Take Hollow Knight, the game mentioned by the OP. In the end, Hollow Knight is a Metroidvania that didn’t stray too far from the conventions of a Metroidvania. It has a lot of Metroidvania cliches like the player needing to progress through the game to double jump. Breaking Metroidvania conventions would be either not having the ability to double jump or starting out with double jump. You have to beat various sections of a level once filled with enemies before unlocking a shortcut or quick travel so you don’t have to go through it the normal way. Hollow Knight is very much a “it’s all about the execution” game with a pretty cool and thematically fitting aesthetic.