/v/ - Video Games

>focusing only on the game becoming easier

if you used the meat in your head you would realize that by performing well the game gets harder

>>16869583

It's something I often see game journos praise, and their main argument is always something like "I want to feel like I did something without actually doing anything", but masked in a really thick layer of mental gymnastics, excuses and sometimes just pure nonsense. Applying it to a real-life competition, they'd want their opponent to throw the game, but in such a way that they could convince themselves it wasn't thrown. They don't really value accomplishment, they just like the feeling of an accomplishment.

What I really don't get is how some people are even surprised to learn RE4 had dymanic difficulty at all. Like, all the enemies are running and dodging and weaving your attacks, but after you die they just stand there like idiots. It's so obvious. One time I was doing this one part with all these acolyte henchmen, and I ended up dying just as I almost reached the end of the section. But I knew exactly what I did wrong, and I was excited to try it again and do it perfectly this time, and what does the game fucking do? Removes two of the crossbow enemies entirely and makes everyone else a lumbering joke that just stands there. I wanted to have fun and overcome a challenge, and the game just took that away from me.

Another thing it does that's actually kind of funny: is I noticed a lot of people when talking about RE4 would say "Oh, you gotta constantly use the knife because the game is stingy with ammo drops" and thinking "What the fuck, no it isn't, this game showers you in ammo". Turns out they didn't realize that RE4, like many games adjusts ammo drop rates based on how much ammo you currently have. If you don't know it's a common thing for games to do, you might hoard ammo, the game will lower ammo drop rates, and it will further drive you to hoard, essentially punishing a player for playing conservatively.

>>16869616

Dead Space was pretty much what RE4 should have been in terms of gameplay.

I think it worked well in God Hand but that's only because that game starts out at a decent difficulty and only goes up from there.

>>16869614

If you used the meat in your head, you'd realise it wouldn't need to adapt to get harder if it was just at that point in the first place. Moment the challenge might get to you, now that harder part is gone, you lose but you lost engaged but fuck you now the game is now forced easier.

>But I don't die I'm the epic hardcore gamer man

Then it shouldn't adapt to ever get harder it should just start at the hardest intended to not waste time, if you select a difficulty you should get what you picked.

>>16869616

DOOM 2016 did it much worse, it did it with health, once your health is like below 50 (maybe 50% I never got health upgrades after the first hell level I just bolted for the end of the game because I ran out of care and seen all the enemies) it will force health drops everywhere to ensure you get to 50, bonus joke is if you kill multiple enemies below 50 they'll all drop the HP needed to get you to 50 so you get even more health like this.

Danger in that game feels so fake because until your health is 0 you might as well be at half health at all time because 1 slight nudge at them and you regen back to it.

>>16869625

Didn't even like it there because some attacks combo you and drop the meter twice and then the enemy just stands there like a retard now and you're stuck, also the hard mode which forces it is NG+.

>>16869614

RE4 sharply lowers the difficulty for just one slip up, and gradually increases in difficulty very slowly with each enemy killed. If I die right before the end of a section, I don't get to retry it with an improved strategy, the opportunity is taken away from me, and I'm forced to just casually walk through it as the enemies don't sprint toward you or dodge attacks anymore. That isn't fun, and it's shit design. If it's really too hard for someone, what's wrong with simply manually lowering the difficulty?

>>16869616

That piece of shit last of us does that as well especially on harder difficulties. You'll use up every single bullet and then convenient the last enemy you killed will drop you ammo.

>>16869625

Aces Wild copies God Hand's difficulty system in a neat way. You take more damage and encounter more numerous and aggressive enemies, but you also deal lots more damage and knockback so the game becomes much faster.

>>16869630

>Doom 2016

Spot on. The game drops more health the less health you have, so health is less a problem of "oh shit I can't tank this attack" and more a problem of "I gotta stay about X health so every time I'm below it I glory kill once and then I'm safe again :^)"

>>16869583

No shit it's a garbage system, it takes control away from you.

The example you made with Kid Icarus is a good one, because that game gives you back control. Easy.

The game doesn't stay easy when you get past the part you had trouble with though. So you can learn from your mistakes and do better in the next area.

I hate this. It means the game rewards you FOR BEING SHIT.

That's the opposite of what it's supposed to do.

>>16869583

>Only game I think did this even close to well was Kid Icarus uprising

That combined with the fact that you upgrade your stuff made the game feel totally pointless to me, also it sucks and isn't fun and is 100% gay compared to Star Fox or Space Harrier

The real challenge mode of RE4 is Mercenaries, I assume that losing doesn't make that any easier but correct me if I'm wrong

>>16869840

It's I have no fucking idea and neither does saucenao, we will all probably go to our graves never knowing the sauce

>>16869820

Your health doesn't upgrade without coming out the weapons stats or something else so by 8.0/9.0 it's 2-3 hits till you die with faster projectiles across all enemies.

Also

>Playing for the 5 minute rail shooter segments that are the minority playtime of almost every level

Lol, weapons stats also start mattering in the multiplayer where you cost you or your team more if you die due to value opponent gets for killing you or amount of team health you lose is tied to the strength value of your weapon.

>>16869858

>>the 5 minute rail shooter segments that are the minority playtime of almost every level

yeah didn't care for that neither

Difficulty systems in general have loads of issues:

- changing enemy health which just makes them bullet sponges instead of making them more intelligent

- reducing your attack so you can't even kill mice anymore

- making some things on easy completely pointless

- making some things on hard completely unbeatable

- reducing your loot or giving you shit things

The core problems all point to the niggerdevs of jewlywood decreasing your stats and items instead of making the enemies AI smarter or the challenges more difficult which would require extra work.

Back in the day loads of games didn't even have difficult systems and that was better.

>>16869877

It's not Hard difficulty it was Professional difficulty. And besides that you weren't ready for it, so it delegated you to Professional-

>Playing Guilty Gear on Arcade Mode yeah I know

>Get to the last fight which is a super powered character

>One win and one loss, round three

>Lose with a pixel of health on the boss

>"Fuck, well I can do it this time"

>Game drops difficulty with no option of opting out

>Absolutely wipe the floor with the boss

>Finish with no sense of accomplishment

>>16869631

Then the problem is the implementation not the concept itself

>>16869915

That's what they always say.

If every implementation of a concept is shit, the concept might be shit as well. Did that thought ever occur to you or do you still believe in Marxist communism?

>>16869915

The concept itself is at fault if it cannot be properly implemented

>>16869830

Anon, no offense but I cannot understand most of your post

>they will have very single abilities

>they stats will still grown

>zero variety of enemies and the two most powerful

Also about the backers apparently there's plenty about the game that has not been implemented(apparently there were supposed to be vehicles, haven AI and some preorder gear but it's nowhere to be found yet).

>>16869951

Be careful with that attitude, you'll piss off all the Soulsfaggots who think the opposite should be the case.

I can't remember the game that did this to me recently but I know what you mean OP. At least some games have the decency to ask first before they lower the difficulty for you. Doing it automatically without letting the player know is scum practice. I wish I remembered the name because I'll never forget how much it pissed me off. This is one of the things modern gaming has been reduced to. Behind every good Mario run, there's a lot of trial and error. This baby handholding shit takes that away from you.

>>16869970

Ah, it was definitely Riviera: The Promised Land. Enemies lose health every time you retry. At least the story was good enough and the fanservice wasn't bad.

>>16869840

>>16869811

>>16869854

It's a Yamatogawa doujin, just can't tell which one. Might as well read all his works because they're all gold.

>dying in games

git gud

>>16869966

>Soulsfaggots who think the opposite should be the case.

That bad players should be given harder challenges when compared to good players? I would think they would want the challenge to be the same at all times or get harder from a base line if anything.

>>16870066

I buy them at cosplay events. They're funny mementos.

>>16869951

>there's nothing wrong with that concept.

>Reward good players with a harder challenge and help bad players by making it easier

What if a shitty player wants to play on normal difficulty? Or a good player doesn't want to play on maximum difficulty?

You're taking away the fucking choice of the player to dumb down the game for niggers.

What even is difficulty? Often it just boils down to what I named here >>16869875

Fallout 4 is a prime example of that where you have simple multipliers: 4x enemy damage, 0.25 times player damage

It makes really hard bosses unbeatable without savescumming because they can often instant-kill you while taking 4 times as long.

If you call that GOOD you're should be shot immediately.

>>16870078

You'd think, right?

However, the end result of the souls mechanic in those games is that people who are struggling have a further disadvantage compared to those who aren't. Essentially, every subsequent attempt at a boss is objectively harder than the first, which only really affects you if you're already bad. It's also a mechanic they defend to the death, like everything else about those games.

>>16870104

> Essentially, every subsequent attempt at a boss is objectively harder than the first

What? How did you even manage to come to that conclusion? You would gain experience of how the boss attacks and what patterns you need to use every time. How does you learning more about a boss make it harder? The only thing I can think of is dark souls 2 & 3 have either health debuffs or buffs that you tend to have in limited numbers unless you play pvp. This doesn't mean each attempt is harder than the last though.

>>16870103

>What if a shitty player wants to play on normal difficulty?

Adapt or die.

>Or a good player doesn't want to play on maximum difficulty?

Adapt or die.

I'm absolutely fucking sick to death of the idea that, just by virtue of sitting down in front of an input device, a player "deserves" to see the ending of a game, especially when the actual difficulty level of most games is drastically overstated.

>Fallout 4 is a prime example of that where you have simple multipliers: 4x enemy damage, 0.25 times player damage

While I agree that this can be lazy, we must also be careful not to simply discredit things like "the enemy has more health/takes less damage". A boss, for example, that dies quickly could possibly be beaten simply by going berserk and outdamaging him. That same boss, with more health, suddenly forces the player to learn and deal with his attack patterns, as the player is unable to deal enough damage faster than the boss.

Thoughts like this are becoming antiquated, however, because of modern game design ideas like "Let's make the game easier every time you fuck up" or "the player's health regenerates", and that's fucking awful.

>>16870103

As if i argued that it was always a good thing and for every game, options exist, i'm ok with adaptive difficulty, but it'd be even better of course if the game also has options to lock difficulty.

>Fallout 4 is a prime example of that where you have simple multipliers

Fuck, if you're gonna use Bethesda's implementation of something to prove that something is a bad concept then you should stop playing games at all, they'll be shit.

>>16870129

>and deal with his attack patterns, as the player is unable to deal enough damage faster than the boss.

Attack patterns? In Fallout or Skyrim?

I think this depends on the type of game but it's an absolute no-go for a shooter. In shooters human enemies should be fucking human. Not "i got hit in the leg, now I'm dead" or "I got bulletproof west, now fire at me for half an hour while I fire at you like a clone trooper from star wars"

>>What if a shitty player wants to play on normal difficulty?

>Adapt or die.

I said: What if a shitty player wants to play on normal difficulty instead of easy difficulty?

>>16870153

>muh your examples suck, so it's not a real proof!

Most of my favourite games don't have difficult levels at all. That doesn't mean they are easy. Difficult levels are often an indicator that the devs are to retarded to do manage their attack damage values to something sensible.

Instead it's either piss easy or it takes for ever and don't tell me running around in fucking circle is some "learning process" of the game.

>>16869951

>asking someone to prove a negative

Why not just give one example that people don't mind? Maybe one that was even mentioned already and starts with a G? The main issue people have with adaptive difficulty is when it's forced and/or hidden.

>>16869966

>Soulsfaggots

go back

>>16870129

>I'm absolutely fucking sick to death of the idea that, just by virtue of sitting down in front of an input device, a player "deserves" to see the ending of a game

>defending adaptive difficulty

Those are contradictory.

>>16870161

>Difficult levels are often an indicator that the devs are to retarded

>>16870206

>defending adaptive difficulty

what

>ideas like "Let's make the game easier every time you fuck up"

>fucking awful

Are you even literate? Besides, here's you defending Soulsfaggots.

>>16869951

>Reward good players with a harder challenge and help bad players by making it easier, that's all it is

I don't want the game to decide what level of difficulty is appropriate for me most of the time. If I die, I don't want the game to get easier, I want to get better and fix the things I fucked up on the next attempt. I know there are people that like adaptive difficulty and I don't have a problem with the option existing, but I do not want to use it.

>Correct way of doing and playing it

Game has baseline dificulty. Adapts to you, and doesn't prevent you from reaching the end.

Once you're done, you can check how hard it was set to: you can treat it as a "score" of sorts, and beating it at a high dificulty means the game considered you a great player.

Optionally, you can manually increase/control the dificulty.

>how to do it wrong and play it wrong

You have stats and grinding to go along with it. The game's calculations are thrown off because you get power-spikes at certain grinding milestones.

Dificulty can't be manually adjusted, and you're stuck with either something you can't handle, or defaults to too easy and doesn't allow you to force it to be harder.

The game can either entirely prevent you to reach the end when you're shit at it, or it can always allow you to reach the end, but due to all the factors mentioned, your final "dificulty" can't be used to gauge how good you are because it bears little relation to your own skill.

So basically:

>JRPG -> Shit (grind)

>WRPG -> Shit (no need to grind)

>RTS -> Shit (AI cheats)

>Shooter -> Good (tweak AI aiming and movement capabilities to match yours)

>2D Fighter -> Good (tweak AI reaction timers)

Alternatively:

>2D Fighter -> Shit (button reading)

In other words: level scaling is a mechanism that can be employed to achieve a desired effect. However, it's often used by people with no clue as to what it's suposed to do or why it should be/not be included. It's neither good, nor bad, it's a tool.

Also goes for players: Rimworld models it's dificulty according to how well your colony is doing (with some faillings and shortsights) but players often do shit like hoarding a large amount of health when their colonists are one-eyed thetraplegics and wonder why the game sent a 20 man wave to invade them.

This leads to bizarre gameplay, where people will knock down their own pawns on purpose to sabotage the dificulty scaling, unable to understand that they're cheesing it, instead believing it to be a normal, intended method to manage threats.

>>16869915

>REAL dynamic difficulty has never been tried

>>16870104

You're completely full of shit faggot.

>>16870441

>>16870492

It was like that in Demon's Souls, he could be misremembering. Basically the world tendency would shift toward black every time you died in human form, which would increase enemy damage output and health, as well as add new black phantoms in certain areas. Still, no excuse for complaints because 1) world tendency wouldn't shift so long as the player stayed in soul form and 2) if you use the meat in your head you'd play smart and cautious anyway, and you'd have to die numerous times before world tendency shifts, so you'd either overcome the challenge before that happened. Not to mention the player can help others kill the area boss and shift their tendency back to light.

Adaptive game difficulty should, at the very least be something you could opt out of.

Ratchet and Clank, kinda, lets you do this in Extra mode which locks you 1 deviation above base difficulty and increases difficulty value up to roughly 5 on subsequent playthroughs.

>>16869830

Last Remnant does something similar where every battle increases a score and higher score -> tougher enemies. IIRC the meta involves deliberately luring many enemy groups together so that it only counts as one "battle" and purposefully fighting as little as possible so that later story stages aren't overpowered.

>>16869625

For me God Hand felt good because the increased difficulty felt like the enemies were getting more and more pissed and aggressive as you style over them like a smug asshole.

>>16870425

I couldn't have said it better.

/thread

>>16869957

>they will have very single abilities

They will have every single ability

>they stats will still grown

Their stats will still grow

>There are zero variety of enemies and the 2 most powerful is super broken

There is zero variety of enemies and the 2 most powerful are super broken.

Protip: just because there's no actual variety doesn't mean the game only has one enemy.

This isn't hard to figure out.

>>16869830

>>16870839

How hard is it to simply copy what LW /does, enemies will absolutely outgrow you if you're not careful but it's not in any way bullshit that I can recall.

Granted once you hit the upper-tier of enemies you're quite fucked regardless, even a single lvl 9 Cyberdisk pod is quite a handful even if you expect it. and have a full squad ready

>>16869583

imo good adaptive difficulty is ranking systems like godhand or especially garegga where the difficulty scales upward but never can go down below the baseline of normal and managing rank actually becomes part of your strategy. this is obviously much easier to implement in arcade and score centric games.

>Game scales downward

<For no reason.

<A cheap shot instant death inflates the player death count.

<Wonky platforming mechanics ie : you land on the platform but clip through it.

>Game pities you and lowers the difficulty for the enemies.

Meanwhile

>Game scales upward.

<Your hard earned gains feel meaningless.

<The same scrub enemies from the start of the game can still stomp you.

<Items and weapons you worked to gain are either ineffective or they don't scale to match everything else.

<Enemies damage and health scales to a limit of x999, yours caps at x10.

>BuT ItS DiFFiCulT & FaIR, cries the retards who defend shitty programing.

Scaling (either direction) was the polio that crippled gaming, we chose this grave. It's time to lay down in it.

>ctrl F "max"

>0 results

This many replies and not a single mention about the most broken adaptive difficulty implementation in a video game ever?

Holy shit fuck Max Payne 1 in that regard.

>incentives you to savescum because everyone is "haha xd not really a hitscanner but sorta"

>if you just keep quickloading and never dying enemies literally become mobile anti-aircraft guns with a fucking sawn-off after a while

Yes, adaptive difficulty is for people with special needs. It's even worse if it's mandatory.

I blame the recent infiltration of western videogame journalism by fake gamer lefty activists.

Back in 2001, Kojima made a special extra difficulty for the European release of MGS2 called "European Extreme", that was harder than regular Extreme. In 2015 for MGS5 he made the chicken hat.

>>16869583

It's really stupid, literally SJW thinking being applied to games.

I always want the difficulty to be static. If you can change it after starting a new game like in infinity engine games, that's one thing, but that at least gives the player control over it and is still static rather than just making the game's difficulty a moving target.

And also, what about competitive gaming, like speedruns and such? Adaptive difficulty would make that either impossible or everyone would just spend the beginning of the run to lower the difficulty as much as possible without wasting too much time.

>>16871017

Max Payne had adaptive difficulty? I've never felt it.

>>16871017

>Max Payne

>adaptive dificulty

The most I can find about it is that when you die too many times in the same chapter/section, the game will eventully give you a free pill bottle when you spawn. Or two, if you keep dying despite the extra help.

I pplayed 1 and 2 recently, didn't notice the enemies being harder or easy, they were hard and that was it.

>>16871226

>And also, what about competitive gaming, like speedruns and such?

Nah they just ignore it most of the time, very rarely does it actually come into play that failing is faster than just powering through the higher ranks, spedruns aren't about being hard opr easy they're about being fast.

RE2 remake speedruns basically do not give a fuck about it, RE4 there's a few places where maybe it's very slightly faster to take a hit on purpose but mostly people who run don't manipulate it unless they're beginners, Separate Ways though does have strats for DA manipulation, but mostly because no one has done as much routing on it as the main game.

>>16871244

>>16871312

if you savescum and never die the adaptive difficulty, even on normal, ramps up the enemy HP, accuracy and damage output to the point where they will shrug off 3 point blank shotgun blasts to the face while 360 noscoping your ass across the level with a fucking peashooter

example ripped from datamining:

[default]

EnemyHealthMultiplier = 0.8;

AmmoFoundMultiplier = 1.0;

PlayerHealthMultiplier = 1.0;

AutoAimCapsuleRadiusMultiplier = 4.0; // clamped to be at least 1.0

AutoAimCapsuleHeightMultiplier = 2.0; // clamped to be at least 1.0

HealthRegenerateMultiplier = 4%; // percents / second

HealthGainedImmediately = 5%; // percents of maximum health to gain immediately before regeneration

BulletTimeGainedPerKillMultiplier = 1.0;

[maximum]

EnemyHealthMultiplier = 1.2;

AmmoFoundMultiplier = 1.0;

PlayerHealthMultiplier = 0.4;

AutoAimCapsuleRadiusMultiplier = 2.0; // clamped to be at least 1.0

AutoAimCapsuleHeightMultiplier = 1.5; // clamped to be at least 1.0

HealthRegenerateMultiplier = 2%; // percents / second

HealthGainedImmediately = 3%; // percents of maximum health to gain immediately before regeneration

BulletTimeGainedPerKillMultiplier = 0.7;

Your health at maximum adaptive difficulty on Fugitive drops to 40% of its original value what the fuck were they thinking

>>16871226

>And also, what about competitive gaming, like speedruns and such? Adaptive difficulty would make that either impossible or everyone would just spend the beginning of the run to lower the difficulty as much as possible without wasting too much time.

I forget the name, but I remember there was a horizontal shooter in which players would intentionally die at certain points to make the upcoming sections easier.

>>16871503

50% more enemy health (0.8 to 1.2) doesn't explain 3 point blank shotguns to the face, unless they were already taking 2.

>>16872083

>>16871226

I caught a segment of one RE speedrun, and they did indeed suicide to reset the difficulty. They probably did it more than once throughout the game.

>>16872083

suiciding to control rank is pretty common in shmups

>>16869583

I agree anon, If tI suck at a game let me play on the hardest difficulty so I can get good at it. I mean I suck at racing games, but I'll still play them on hardest. rn playing Grid 2 hardest, without using any rewinds, it's very rewarding to master a track and beat the AI.

The only good adaptive difficulty I've ever played was left 4 dead, which only determined when to throw more bullshit at you (i.e. tanks and hoards)

>>16869951

That's a really narrow-minded view of how people play games and what they want out of a game. What if I am someone who has always played a couple of different types of games, say FPSes and strategy games, and I wanted to get into RPGs, but I didn't want the game to hold my hand because that's what I'm used to? I would probably be shit at most of them despite my past with those other games, but I also relish challenge because that's what I'm used to. If a game changes difficulty for you, that's taking control away from you and it's frustrating. Imagine for example if you were a pro soccer (or football if you're not a burger) player. Then during a match, you miss a goal a couple of times, so the opponent goalie moves the goal slightly closer to your side of the field. What soccer player would not take that as a tremendous insult and extremely condescending? Why do you think those players take that attitude?

>Prove it

Don't be a child. You already know that neither of us can "prove" that our viewpoints are correct simply by conjuring a single example.

>>16878077

I've beat it on 9.0, I thought it was super rewording to play, pretty much the only amazing action game on the 3DS.

>>16878224

>Are you braindead? i'm arguing in defense of a mechanic devs can implement if they so choose, not that that's the best way and all games should follow suit, not all games are for everybody.

I'm not sure why the insult was necessary when it's very easy to see that, to use RE4 as an example, multiple different types of players could play the game. Adaptive difficulty is like a sledgehammer. It applies too broadly and there's almost never an option to turn it off. This is why other posters were mocking you and comparing it to things like Communism. If there was a simple checkbox to turn off the feature, that might be okay, but nobody does that because it requires more effort from a technical perspective to make the game have both static difficulty levels and adaptive difficulty. Most developers are unfortunately too prideful and would assume that their adaptive difficulty system suits everybody. What I was trying to demonstrate is that it actually only suits one very specific type of player.

>As if the player has that much choice to begin with

Games are about agency. Taking away more agency from the player is not the solution just because everyone does it, you lamb.

>Maybe he shouldn't have been so shit, maybe most players will actually like the change, what of the opposite scenario where a very good player gets a tougher match? what player wouldn't be proud they're so good their opponents have to work harder against him?

You've missed the point. A pro soccer competitor is a specific type of player. They play to win and/or represent their home town, country or club. I was using the soccer competitor as an archetype for a type of player, someone who has a specific motivation when they come in playing a game. Nobody in a scene like this would take a game whose rules constantly change seriously.

>>16878860

>None of that is a problem with the concept itself, but of a bad implementation.

You've already admitted the concept itself is "A game which gets easier if you're doing poorly or harder if you're doing well." I already explained twice, the problems with this idea. There will be players who your game intentionally appeals to that will not like this and I tend to be one of them. There are "better" implementations from my experience, but that is usually because the actual adaptation is minimized – RE2make, for example, barely shifts difficulty on Hardcore mode at all. What about this is so hard to understand? Conceptually, I have a problem with a game changing the rules on me because I am a mathfag and rules whore that enjoys the reward chemicals in my brain from figuring out a system. You are taking that away from me by constantly shifting the rules. The concept inherently involves rule changing.

>The one that ones a level of challenge according to his skill?

So you're just going to sit here and pretend that players whom I keep describing don't exist? You've never met a person who believes that a challenge is null and void in value if you suddenly change the rules? I've met lots of those people. You're just lying, poorly, in order to win an argument online.

>To a certain extent, is it a legitimate complaint that Doom doesn't have a pacifist, demon friendship mode? i'm so frustrated i lack that agency, therefore Doom is shit.

You aren't required to kill any demons to beat Doom except for the Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind, but sure. It's very possible but heavily RNG-based to beat Doom in this way. You completely evaded my point by bringing up a complete non sequitur about Doom. How the fuck is Doom relevant here? My point was that you are advocating a bad trend literally because other studios do it, and your response is to bring up Doom? Are you a complete moron? Have you even played a game in the last 10 years that resembles Doom? No, you haven't, because they don't exist (and no, the retro indie FPSes aren't like Doom either). Guess what? It's an example that has no bearing on the trend of agency decreasing in video games, which is continuing and obvious.

>Snippy quips and one liners

Don't do any services to your lack of an argument.

>>16879184

Here's another good example I just remembered: Demon's Souls. Remember World Tendency? Remember how almost everyone who played the entire game chose to commit suicide in the Nexus? That's because they would rather consistently play the entire game with half their health pool with the same difficulty, than have full health and constantly suffer the rules shifting on them when they die. If you were to make that one change of simply preventing this from happening, to force people to revive and change World Tendency constantly, there would have been a huge number of people who would have simply not enjoyed the game. And what exactly do you gain from enforcing adaptive difficulty there?

>>16879275

>the difficulty settings don't change the rules of the game most of the time,

Is English not your first language? Changing anything at all about a game works is changing the rules. A game is a system of rules. From Doom's monster placement changes, to simple "Make HP and damage numbers bigger," these are all rule changes. You cannot change the difficulty of a game without changing how the rules work. Of course, you'll disagree with me while providing no example of how your completely illogical idea of difficulty works. That's the convenience of being a shitposting clown with no actual design knowledge. You get to make "clever" quips and snipes without providing any real solutions, all while proclaiming how your Communism hasn't been tried yet. Convenient, isn't it?

>bad implementation, bad implementation

Okay, I can tell you have never even tried to think this through from a design perspective. Take Doom as an example because it keeps coming up. How would you make Doom an adaptive difficulty game that isn't shit? Well, let's look at how Doom's difficulty levels change. They add monsters to the map with the exception of ITYTD and Nightmare. How would you make this work with adaptive difficulty? You could simply change the monster spawn tables when the player is doing good or bad. That is quite obviously terrible from the outset because suddenly teleporting in or out a bunch of monsters is extremely poor level design (there aren't very many encounters in the official Doom levels that do this, but it is a common trope in shitty custom WADs). So what else could we do? We could fall back on the old "change the numbers around" routine by inflating or deflating HP and damage numbers and the like. This is also a terrible idea because Doom already has a lot of RNG inherent in damage values. You can't change the item locations without changing the whole design of the map, or making many variations of said map, because there was some meticulous thought put into their placement such as, "When the player arrives at monster encounter A, they should have the shotgun already." When you tick down the list of options it becomes increasingly evident that you will have to rethink the entire game from the ground up, centering around this idea of adaptive difficulty. Can it be done? Sure. Has anyone done it well? No – that much we seem to agree on. At what point do you decide that the effort of employing this "amazing" concept which no one has executed upon is not worth it? Every game I've seen with adaptive difficulty had the concept pushed in sometime in the middle of development – not at the very beginning. The reason why this is obvious is due to these implementation flaws we keep talking about. If they had designed the game with adaptive difficulty as a pillar from the outset, the chances are good that these flaws would not be as apparent.

Yet, in all of your amusing quips and greentext, you can't provide a single idea or example of how this would actually be executed well. Nothing like "Well, Game X came really close to doing it right but they should have changed Y." You can't commit to this simple concept but you're willing to insult and berate anyone who disagrees with you. Why? I simply don't understand your motivation here. Why try to "fix" the "problem" of static difficulty choices when it isn't really a problem at all? And then get mad about it when you clearly haven't even thought it through?

>while true in some cases it is also true that most of the game is not for the player to control and if that makes the player frustrated then the game isn't for them, such as a player wanting to befriend demons in Doom, or some other absurd thing like that.

You are conflating control over parameters of the game that the player has a reasonable expectation of controlling, such as difficulty, with control over the fundamental design principles of the game, which is asinine and makes no sense. Nobody goes into Doom expecting to be a pacifist because even a bunch of college-age wahoos like id Software at the time were able to properly market their game as being one where violence is at the core. If a player were to buy your game expecting to do something radically different such as that, then it is actually a failure of the marketing team. However, to use RE2make as an example again, if I see three difficulty levels, then I don't expect the game to magically puppeteer a bunch of bullshit behind the scenes to create my "Adapted Experience (tm)." You are subverting player expectations in a way that is not beneficial to anyone.

I challenge you to commit and write up something that actually shows how your concept could be executed well. But I'm sure you'd rather snipe from your high perch of ignorance instead.

>>16879356

>Sure. Has anyone done it well? No

People should play arcade games more.

The thing about adaptive difficulty is that most games do it to facilitate newer players and is basically a glorified difficulty select. But then there's Battle Garegga, where the adaptive difficulty (also known as 'rank' in shmup circles) is another obstacle you have to overcome.

Everything you do in Battle Garegga increases rank. Shooting, picking up items, and just existing increases it. The more resources you have, the faster it increases. And the only way to decrease rank is to die. It is humanly impossible to 1cc Garegga without dying or bombing, because the rank will shoot up to inhumane levels and the enemies will have ridiculous HP. Once the rank gets that high, it's incredibly difficult to get it back down because it works in gradations, and the amount of rank decreased on death depends on how many lives you already had in stock (the more you had, the less rank gets reduced). Knowing this, it becomes essential to plan out where you will suicide in order to control the rank. If you hoard resources, rank will come to bite you in the ass, so optimally you always have to live on the edge to keep it under control. But you only start out with two extra lives, won't you quickly run out of lives?

That's where the scoring system comes into play. Every million points you get another life (an average survival run will net you 6-7 million points), and the main scoring methods are medal chaining (picking up medal items before they drop off-screen) and destroying background targets with your bombs. Bomb is in turn replenished by picking up bomb items, but also suiciding; each time you die you gain half a bomb stock. This creates a cycle: to score you must bomb, to bomb you must sacrifice a life, to sacrifice a life you must score. Had it not been for the rank system, there would be no point in engaging with this system.

Another facet of the rank system is how it impacts item economy. The amount of rank each fired shot increases depends on your shot power level, and how much options you have. So initially you want to avoid power-up items to avoid inflating the rank, but high-level players will get power-ups early so they can increase the score they get from tick milking bosses (shooting the non-vital parts of bosses), where each tick point is worth more depending on your shot level. Similarly, there are secret more powerful option formations you can activate by picking up items in a certain order, but these increase rank more than normal. You can also increase the autofire rate of your ship permanently, but as rank increases per shot this will make rank shoot up faster, and even dying won't reset your autofire rate.

In practice, this means you constantly have to change your plan depending on if you unintentionally die somewhere (being able to afford more power-ups now that rank is lower) or if you mess up a medal chain or accidentally pick up an option or power-up item before you intended. Stage 5 in Garegga simply wouldn't work in any other shmup.

The sequel to Garegga, Armed Police Batrider, further changed up things by letting you reduce rank by grazing bullets, and having you pick a team of fighters KoF-style. When you die, your next ship will instead be the next guy in your team whose ship has different properties, so not only are you suiciding to keep rank under control, but also to switch out characters to suit the situation.

Embed related explains it in great detail.

>>16879598

Okay, let me see if I have this straight. You're just cheerleading for an idea that sounds cute to you, regardless of whether it is practical or not. With no consideration to how hard it would be for the designers and developers on your team. Again, I fail to understand why you've even posted on this thread. You don't have a position with which you can convince someone of anything because you have no implementation or design knowledge, or even examples of games that came close to the type of gameplay experience that you want. Yet you seem to bear absolute conviction for this concept, while pretending that you somehow don't. If that were the case you would have stopped replying to me a while ago. I was simply trying to pick your brain to see if there was something engaging to discuss but all you do is call me a retard and reply with greentext one-liners. What a disappointment – I merely wanted you to provide an example or a radical new design for an adaptive game for the sake of discussion because it's a lot less boring than "You're a retard." I suppose you are still in that stage of posting where replying to detailed discussion with minimalist answers is amusing to you because it gives the perception that you're wasting the other person's time. I was there too once. In reality, I just type rather quickly and so do most people who provide lengthy posts, which is why I moved out of that phase.

>>16879549

Thanks for providing something to actually discuss instead of simply bickering. I admit my history with arcade games is sorely lacking. My background is mostly that of PC games with a decent dose of consoles mixed in.

You have described a pretty interesting strategy that includes using life loss as a method of controlling the pace of the game. However, I can't help but get the impression that this adaptive system was put into place to prevent hogging of the cabinets by overly-experienced players at arcades and/or force more coins out of the less-skilled ones. I would probably be more interested to learn about the sequels in that franchise which are less influenced by the coin-op arcade culture. Does Armed Police Batrider come from a coin-op background as well?

>>16879668

>However, I can't help but get the impression that this adaptive system was put into place to prevent hogging of the cabinets by overly-experienced players at arcades and/or force more coins out of the less-skilled ones. I would probably be more interested to learn about the sequels in that franchise which are less influenced by the coin-op arcade culture. Does Armed Police Batrider come from a coin-op background as well?

Basically all arcade games are coin-op games, though you do have games inspired by it like Mecha Ritz and Blue Revolver which are doujin PC games first.

The actual intent behind the rank system in Garegga has been a subject of debate for some time. If it was meant to be just another means of stealing quarters, it sure is a ridiculously overcomplicated implementation; rank in arcade games has been around since Gradius where difficulty was simply tied to your power level and how long you didn't die. After all, dynamic difficulty systems were very appealing to arcade operators, as it ensured players would die and keep putting in more quarters.

On the other hand, none of the intricacies of rank are ever explained in Garegga, largely because the arcade format doesn't lend itself well to having the space for in-depth tutorials. Around release people had no idea how Garegga actually worked, and not until people dumped the ROM and looked in the code did people realize how it actually worked. Thankfully the PS4 remaster of Garegga does expose many of the game's hidden systems with some guides to boot.

But intent or not, in the end the rank management gave Garegga an incredible amount of depth hitherto never before seen in shmups, and the same developer (Shinobu Yagawa) would go on to build upon the rank system in Armed Police Batrider, Battle Bakraid, Ibara, and some other stuff like Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu Black Label. It may also have inspired Dodonpachi Daioujou and Saidaioujou with their Hyper Rank systems.

>>16879204

Been lurking this discussion and while I don't agree with the broad strokes condemnation of Adaptive Difficulty, like any kind of difficulty options in a game or other mechanical implementations I think AD is prone to generalized issues that developers are too lazy to fine tune. Much like how in most RPGs, Easy/Normal/Hard modes commonly equate to just being changes to damage and health ratios for players & enemies. However.

>Remember World Tendency?

This really isn't a great example because Demon's Souls is a game that takes some very opposite world approaches to mechanics like AD. Keep in mind during the online days this was mitigated by body form allowing you to summon, so you were incentivized to call for help when things escalated to NPC black phantom levels of bad, but that doesn't change the fact that for both solo players and offline warriors you don't want to stay in body form if you don't want to have that impact to tendency for world specific rewards. It's not great but it's in a game that does a lot of bizarre things. You don't see that specific combination of penalizing health, providing harder and more punishing enemies for failure, as well as locking players out of rewards in the same game. It's easy to understand why that combination never returned again in later FROM titles even if individual elements did.

To jump back to my earlier statements about RPG's and difficulty. An AD implementation I think gets poorly done in a lot of games is scaling enemies to player level. Meaning the strength of enemies or the types of enemies that spawn altogether changes based on how strong you are. This was done badly in titles like TES: Oblivion since it's an open world game that incentivizes exploration, but leveling up doesn't mean you are going to be equipped to handle the harder enemies since to my remembrance, any skills you level up can make enemies harder including armor skills and dialogue skills. Not great since the change in combat difficulty doesn't match the skills you might be working on.

However, a good form of level scaling AD is in Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter. The game is built on the premise that you are going to replay either the whole game or sections of it multiple times using the SOL system. Whenever you do use SOL it will take stock of how well you had done and change the enemy encounters to match this rating. This winds up working for a number of reasons but more simply it's because the game is a tactical RPG so the new enemies mean not just more health on them, but also different attack ranges and mobs to support the larger threats. You still have to play smart each fight which is engaging. It's the difference between a swarm of bats being replaced with a minotaur and some goblins. The first one is challenging when you don't have great equipment or better skills, but when you do you don't return to that same point you can't clean house , instead you have a more appropriate challenge for your capabilities.

This works better than in oblivion because the game only scales off your combat performance (not like there is any social rpg mechanics), repeat playthroughs let you keep any skills and weapons you acquire, and you also have access to a dragon form that allows you to be a threat at any level at the cost of some in-game resources. So the game can get harder each playthrough without overwhelming the player unfairly, and you still keep the combat interesting even if you replay from the beginning. That's a win-win in my books.

>>16878860

>>16878224

>>16879275

>>16879598

>>16880185

You talk like a fag, your shit is retarded, you seem to not even be able to read and you insist on posting a reaction image with every post like some fresh refugee. Please off yourself.

>>16871328

>RE2 remake speedruns basically do not give a fuck about it

Maybe it's cause I was watching a marathon run but the runner I saw was managing his ammo counts and often purposefully shooting walls during down times to lower the difficulty level. It's a form of long-term RNG mitigation so you so don't have zombos lunging at you every which way for most of the game.

>>16880185

>I'm saying that you can't prove a concept wrong even if you think every implementation of it so far has been bad.

This is a meaningless assertion by itself, which is my main point. Any concept which has not yet been implemented well can be subject to the same lofty idealism (again, Communism). I'm asking you to make the discussion more interesting by committing to a solution. You are refusing. As engineers say, "The difference between a critic and an engineer is that a critic points out the problem, but an engineer provides a solution to that problem."

>do you acknowledge that difficulty can change even if the rules don't change?

I acknowledge that your definition of "game rules" is entirely arbitrary and not based on any design education or even a concrete definition. I struggle to even conceptualize how you delineate the difference between a "game rule" and whatever you seem to think aren't "game rules," because you haven't explained your idea of it and it isn't based on any design literature I've studied or any class I've taken. No point in discussing something that the other person cannot even agree upon the semantics because we will continue to argue semantics, which is boring. I don't know how to convince you that your definition of "game rules" is wrong, or at best, useless in this discussion. You have changed a number, mechanic, or device that the player has come to expect as consistent. The core of it is subversion of player expectation when it is harmfui to the experience for both the player and you as a designer (because you do not know how to accurately foresee what the player will do). The definition of "rules" is itself a tangent, but yet you still attack me for going on tangents.

>i'm saying it can be just as valid for devs to implement if they choose to

And I'm asking you to provide an existing or theoretical design which demonstrates its validity in the interest of discussion but instead you pout like a child, stick out your tongue and say "I don't have to, retard. That's not my point." As you can see, this hasn't gone anywhere yet.

>>16880284

>However, a good form of level scaling AD is in Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter. The game is built on the premise that you are going to replay either the whole game or sections of it multiple times using the SOL system. Whenever you do use SOL it will take stock of how well you had done and change the enemy encounters to match this rating. This winds up working for a number of reasons but more simply it's because the game is a tactical RPG so the new enemies mean not just more health on them, but also different attack ranges and mobs to support the larger threats. You still have to play smart each fight which is engaging. It's the difference between a swarm of bats being replaced with a minotaur and some goblins. The first one is challenging when you don't have great equipment or better skills, but when you do you don't return to that same point you can't clean house , instead you have a more appropriate challenge for your capabilities.

I haven't played BOF5 but the thing about "New Game Plus" style difficulty changes is that they are explicit. It's much the same with normal difficulty levels: The game explicitly tells you that the rules are changing, so be prepared. One problem with "adaptive difficulty" is that it isn't very well defined, as we can see by the confusion here. The definition I'm using is "Changes to the difficulty with the objective of giving the player a better experience, but without their knowledge, like a stage hand working behind the curtains." The crux of this concept is that many players, regardless of genre audience, will be bothered by rule changes that they don't know about as a matter of principle. The mechanics you are describing sound a lot more explicit than what I was thinking of.

>>16880327

I think he just doesn't want to admit he was wrong, his arguments just keep making less and less sense as he descends into hysterics.

>>16880710

>No, it is pure logic, want to prove a concept wrong then prove IT wrong, not just share examples of what you think has been a bad implementation of said concept and claim that proves the concept itself is wrong.

That's logically impossible, though. Shame you missed that in your "purely logical" assertion. It's like trying to prove that God isn't real. Yes, we have tons of examples which show that if God is real, he is ludicrously incompetent or malevolent, so it is more comforting to think he is not, but it is logically impossible to prove God definitively does not exist because God is an idea. Similarly to a religious argument, the burden of proof is actually upon you to prove that this concept is workable, since my position is that it has not been used successfully in the past (aside from perhaps arcade-style games as the other poster mentioned, but he entered the argument late). I am not stating that it is unworkable, only that I am skeptical because many players exist that do not like rule changes and would like to see a working example.

>You didn't provide any definition either,

As I said already: A game is a system of rules. Anyone with basic reading comprehension can infer that this means everything in a game is a rule.

>soccer example that you choose to ignore

Your soccer example is completely fallacious because you are conflating multiplayer with singleplayer game design. That is like saying I "increased the difficulty" of Quake 3 by being matched against better players. Bots are still composed of game rules because a designer had to sit there and actually design rules for the bots to follow. So, if you're in a bot match and you increase the difficulty of the bots, you are still changing the rules. Many players will become accustomed to the behavior of bots at certain difficulty levels and act accordingly. For example, "Hard" difficulty AI in Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition is rather difficult until you realize that you can tower rush their starting gold deposit and they lose the game every single time. These are systems of rules that the players expoit. People are not systems of rules because they are completely unpredictable and they are not sourced to a bunch of instructions written by some dude at a computer. Nobody reasonable in the game or game design community uses the word "difficulty" to refer to player skill, so stop being pretentious. I am actually doing you a favor by ignoring these completely asinine statements but you insist that I call you out on them.

>Well, what even do you think is my definition of "game rules"?

I already asked you. Why don't you tell me? Why the fuck are you asking me this question? I'm not going to read your mind for you. For any reasonable discussion to be had, definitions of terms must be established. Usually they are assumed to be the same as those found in popular culture, education or literature.

>if i give enemies more hp is that changing the rules for you?

Yes. The rule is "Every time I see an Enemy X, that enemy will have Y HP." It is a rule that the player becomes accustomed to in their brain. If the enemy had varying HP, then that would be different. Consider a pen & paper RPG, like D&D. There are rules in place for generating the HP of monsters and players. What if that rule was simply "You get 10 HP?" Does that make it not a rule?

>First that was and has never been my argument, yet for some reason you insist on that, i genuinely don't understand why.

Because entering a thread to say "Someone can make adaptive difficulty work at some point, probably, but I don't know how." is entirely fucking pointless. It is a non-statement. Likewise to your confusion, I do not understand why you would do this. I was hoping for a more in-depth discussion, so I picked your brain. You seem to take great offense to this, or if your words are to be believed, are amazed that I would want a deeper discussion out of such a broad assertion.

>What do i actually claim? That a few examples of a badly implemented mechanic doesn't mean the mechanic itself inherently bad.

Right, and many people in this thread responded with, in terms of varying politeness, "I've never played a game where it works so I think you're mistaken." Your response to this seems to be "Well you can't prove it can't be done correctly." Which is accurate, because that is logically impossible, so it's a pointless thing to say.

>Second can't you think of a theoretical design that would work?

That's your job, sweet pea. You made the assertion. I don't care to put forth the effort because I am cynical about the application of said concept due to past experience. You don't seem to care either, but I was hoping that you did based on the vehemence of your posts.

>Third i honestly don't give a flying fuck what you think would make the discussion more interesting.

Strange that you're satisfied with this pointless bickering, then.

>>16880545

>The definition I'm using is "Changes to the difficulty with the objective of giving the player a better experience, but without their knowledge, like a stage hand working behind the curtains."

Well to address a more invisible change, I wouldn't have had a problem with Oblivion's level scaling if it didn't

< A) Also trigger on non-combat skills given how leveling up works (it is dependent on the 7 major skills your character class has tagged)

< B) didn't increase disproportionately high (enemies get far stronger than you do)

and

< C) get splashed into every enemy encounter in the game everywhere.

There is a very specific reason why this does not work. And I get why Bethesda wanted to implement such a feature after getting the Elder Scrolls IP. From memory, some people had a problem with how Morrowind handled enemy difficulty. Where it's determined by area rather than player level, so dungeons felt like they were built around a specific range of levels, and regions might be inaccessible or very difficult to traverse because the encounter difficultly is set very high. Oblivion is a game that very much wanted to push the Open world and ProcGen meme and it shows because in addition to nonsensical oblivion gates that just appear anywhere, and the massive disconnect between side quests, the main quest, and the actual world; enemy scaling is just another symptom of a design that isn't focused.

As far as my own experiences with your specific implementation of AD. I do like the AI director in Left 4 Dead 1/2. It handles it's job, it does have a flaw with the variety of things it can throw at you. Since stages even in the 2nd game don't have a lot of interactive objects or divergent routes, and the vocabulary of enemies is basically "send a horde" or "spawn X special infected" it gets dull after many repeated runs but we're talking about a good year of me playing both of those games before I eventually burned out on them.

There are other forms of adaptive difficulty that work and the thread has definitely pointed them out. But the "invisible hand" is one I haven't seen that often enough to judge negatively.

>The crux of this concept is that many players, regardless of genre audience, will be bothered by rule changes that they don't know about as a matter of principle.

Well that's not something I think is always the fault of mechanics. If it bothers you to have the game tinker behind the scenes I don't think it will matter how well or badly it's implemented. The latter just gives way to more reasons to dislike Adaptive difficulty.

>>16880785

>The AI Director

That's a good point. I have not played L4D in ages, but I did play Vermintide and what I have noticed is that to make this design enjoyable, concessions had to be made for consistency. For example, enemy waves only spawn in specific locations, like a hole in a corner wall or an alleyway entrance. The timing and size of the waves may differ, but they can only spawn in so many locations and since both L4D and Vermintide are designed to be replayed many times these spawn locations are usually learned rather quickly by the players. The exception to this are the random boss encounters, random Stormvermin patrols and specialist enemies like Globadiers and Gutter Runners, but they each have significant fanfare to let you know they're around (even the Gutter Runner who is supposed to be a stealth assassin). These changes are not as subtle or "nefarious" as the ones that I've seen in games where adaptive difficulty takes away from the experience. Also, to tie back to what I said before, the Director was a feature that both Valve and Fatshark considered from the very beginning of the game. They built their games entirely around it, so the result is a much better experience.

>If it bothers you to have the game tinker behind the scenes I don't think it will matter how well or badly it's implemented.

Maybe I should be more specific. I think it's ridiculous for a game to change rules in a subtle manner. I don't get mad if a game has waves with an unpredictable number of enemies, for example, but if enemies of the same type were to suddenly have more HP because I was doing well, that's not acceptable. If the game told me such a change was happening, it might be acceptable, but I would still think it lame and lazy.

>>16880338

>Maybe it's cause I was watching a marathon run but the runner I saw was managing his ammo counts and often purposefully shooting walls during down times to lower the difficulty level. It's a form of long-term RNG mitigation so you so don't have zombos lunging at you every which way for most of the game.

I remember watching one and thinking just that but said run also had the DA value on screen and it didn't change when shooting walls so I thought it was probably just an aggro / inventory management thing.

I don't run the game myself though so I could be wrong on that.

>>16880785

It's funny. Bethesda took the level scaling meme so seriously that they eventually came full circle to palette swaps. Rather than spawning harder types of monsters at higher levels like in Oblivion (ogre instead of a rat, or whatever), they decided it'd be better to same type of monster with a word added to its name and maybe extra HP or an ability (all the flavors of feral ghouls).