Difficult games have become very popular over the years. Since the rise of the Souls-like, many other developers have attempted to ride the gravy train without really attempting to understand what the actual point of a game made difficult is attempting to do.
A difficult game these days isn’t usually meant to be hard for the sake of being hard. It’s meant to reasonably challenge the player with a fair amount of balance between both the player and the obstacles they face. It’s an essential part of its experience. Some games tend to miss the mark on this philosophy though. So here are 10 design choices that can be utilized in difficult games to often frustrating degrees.
10 10. Spam
Probably one of the biggest indicators of lazy game design. Spam often plagues games that try to be difficult, but don’t understand what actually makes the game itself difficult when considering the tools the game gives the player to tackle its challenges.
The game just attempts to constantly overwhelm the player with enemies and hazards. And even when you’ve adjusted to it, it still doesn’t make it any less frustrating when you get hit with some bad luck and the spam successfully puts you in an undesirable situation.
9 9. Health Caps
Some games also feature a very polarizing mechanic that has to do with your HP. Some Souls games will cut your health in half after you die while Ninja Gaiden games have something called ‘Lasting Damage’ which will introduce an artificial cap to your maximum health if you take too much damage during an encounter.
Dying and having your progress get reset already feels like enough of a punishment. Halving your maximum health feels unnecessary. Lasting damage seems to serve a similar function of placing more stress on the player for making mistakes separate from the threat of losing progress. They’re neat gimmicks but questionable at best in how much they actually add to the experience.
8 8. Troll-ish Asset Placement
Have you ever been playing a game and instantly knew that the developer placed particular assets somewhere just to troll you? A hazard that makes a simple jump more difficult than it needs to be? An otherwise non-threatening enemy placed in an area that gives you no room to move when fighting them?
Or perhaps it’s a bunch of long-range threats placed in areas inaccessible to the player to arbitrarily make the level more difficult? Whatever it is, it was probably due to either a lack of attention to detail, a lack of any real thought/effort or the creators genuinely trolling you.
7 7. Off-Screen Damage
Few things feel worse than getting hit by something you couldn’t see. While some games make attacks from enemies off-screen heavily telegraphed or give them unique audio queues, some others don’t give the same level of detail.
It’s a rather interesting quarrel. Some games program enemies to never attack at all unless they’re on the screen which gives the player an easy exploit. Off-screen damage isn’t always automatically frustrating from game to game either, such as in an FPS where the game often at least gives you visual feedback as to where exactly you’re being shot from and a reasonable chance to respond… usually. It really depends on how it’s implemented, but when it’s done wrong, you definitely notice.
6 6. Overly Obsessive Tracking
Tracking in games is necessary to make sure the player doesn’t fall asleep at the wheel, so to speak, when engaging with hazards. Ideally, depending on the game, it will often give the player a chance to avoid almost all damage in any situation by playing well.
There are times though where damage can feel unavoidable due to something like obsessive tracking. Times where something akin to a heat-seeking missile will continue to follow the player for what seems like forever. An attack that looks like wouldn’t hit you ends up turning the enemy around on their feet like a record player to do so or the good old aimbot. Too much player tracking can certainly be annoying.
5 5. Damage Sponges
Another example of what can feel like lazy design. If you can’t make an enemy harder through its intelligence, just make it more tedious to kill through its HP pool.
Enemies having more health than the player is fine, but when you have to pump a bazillion bullets into them or slash them a gajillion times, it becomes more of a war of attrition that feels like it’s just wasting your time than genuinely trying to challenge you. And when the enemy itself has other modifiers that enable it to kill you relatively quickly for the sake of difficulty, it can get a bit frustrating.
4 4. Poorly Telegraphed Moves
You know the ones. The moves that just instantly come out with little to no wind-up or start-up frames. The ones that are specifically used to catch the player off-guard when they think they have the advantage. While those ones can feel cheap at first they can at least be baited out and manipulated since you can reliably recreate the conditions for them in normal gameplay.
We’re talking about the ones that come out randomly with no heads up for the player just to get some cheap damage on them. The ones that feel like they have no criteria to be met for them to be used that would justify them being so fast. Or they just have awful looking animations.
3 3. One-Hit Hazards/Moves
The great equalizers. Regardless of the game, anything that kills in one-hit is often the greatest example of OP-ness. It can introduce an element of unnecessary stress for the player when handled poorly. What’s worse is that you often don’t know they kill in one-hit until you’re actually hit by them.
Sure, you now know for next time, but it can really take the wind out of your sails if you felt like you were fighting an enemy fairly well or just messed up getting pass a hazard you normally have no trouble getting pass.
2 2. Excessively Long Grab Attacks
Grab attacks are moves that often prevent you from actually playing the game. To be fair, there isn’t really any other way they can function. They either take away all control or feature some sort of quick-time event to make the player feel like they’re doing something to help avoid damage.
It’s when they feature painfully long animations that things get annoying. It’s like the developers are laughing at you for getting grabbed by making the enemy take their sweet time with its ridiculously lengthy animation. They feel like they take forever to finish. Not to mention the insane amounts of damage they do sometimes. You’re usually left to sit there and wait before it finally lets you play the game again if you even survive it.
1 1. Ambushes
Ambushes are probably most frustrating to new players of a game that aren’t yet aware of the game’s surprises. This doesn’t make them any less frustrating for veterans that still have to play around them though. Carefully planning to manage ambush scenarios can be just as annoying as running into them the first couple of times.
It can be falling into a pit of enemies or something as simple as one enemy hiding behind a corner or the game taking a cheap shot at the player after a cutscene ends. Whatever the case is, surviving an ambush, whether you took a little or a lot of damage, can sometimes feel worse than just outright dying.