Games that can never be made again because of difficulty

LeninGHOLA said:
Which ones, specifically?
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truhtfully, Everquest. it was extremely shallow in the way of challenging mechanics. it was simply very tedious. AC was a better mmo in my opinion, and while it wasn't as tedious, it had an actual learning curve. there was really such a thing as sucking or being good at it...which did not correlate to the strength of your gear.
 
FLCLimax said:
truhtfully, Everquest. it was extremely shallow in the way of challenging mechanics. it was simply very tedious. AC was a better mmo in my opinion, and while it wasn't as tedious, it had an actual learning curve. there was really such a thing as sucking or being good at it...which did not correlate to the strength of your gear.
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actually this is not really true. EQ was based un MUD designs which were very challenging because they were played by hardcore players and not casuals.

EQ had the biggest learning curve, and you could tell in about 5 mintues who was good at thier class and who wasn't. Just mashing buttons was not good enough when eq first came out, because it very easy to wipe in any zone. the trains in mistmoore, unrest and KC as a result of mistakes by players were legendary.


that's probably the worse thing about most MMO's and RPG these days, is that they have all become WoW or COD where anything that could become a slight hinderance to the player is labled "tedius" and bansished.
 
what you call learning curve and challenge in EQ is bascally just tedium. i was there, i played(an liked) it too. AC was better imo. besides the obvious tactics you pick up in every single game under the sun, EQ had a low skill ceiling. grind, time sinks, tedium, repetition...that made up the challenge.

the rate of mana regen, how you needed to regen, etc. are all just arbitrary designs, and it pales in comparison to a game with a higher skill ceiling. the next EQ game made will be a disgrace. it'll have more in common with WoW(funny side thought, for all the guys who scramble to defend stuff like swtor, rift,etc...WoW and EQ are worlds apart in so many ways).

once you got all the mechanics squared away and had a full set of skills the skill ceiling wasn't much higher in EQ. AC was much better in this area. EQ is less about being proactive or playing well in the right situation as it is performing the optimal rotation and actions over and over and needing the right gear and buffs to do it.

the major difference between the two was the difference in emphasis on vertical vs horizontal progression and gameplay mechanics.
 
don't get me wrong, i would prefer something like EQ to something like WoW. i just won't pretend like EQ's challenge came from gameplay and you had to be a good player. you had to play alot more than anything.
 
ultraman7k said:
I agree completely with TMNT on the NES.

I don't know a singly person that beat that game. My friend bought the game, and if we were lucky, we would make it out of the underwater bomb defuse level only to be beaten up by whatever else lay around the corner. I can count the number of times on 1 hand where we made it out of the swimming level.

Needless to say this game changed hand many a time.

Add to the fact that Raphael and Michaelangelo were pretty useless with their super short range...and you almost always had to use Donatello to beat the Rhino dude by crouching at the top of the staircase and attack...

Refer to this list.

http://www.retrojunk.com/content/article/7790/index/

Many a tear was shed playing these games.
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Oh yes, I remember how hard that game was. I died so many times in the underwater level. I think I only made it to the next level a couple times.
 
omi said:
lol eq wow those were the day. I remember asking around the world for a monk and cleric to get my body back and rez. How can you forget about corpse dragging. Oh the good old sebili. Wizard is the only class that can take you to places in EQ. I think wiz, cleric and druid are the ultimate gold making class. my most used line in eq is "50plat for sow?" haha
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Enchanters made a shit ton of money with "Kodiak's Endless Intellect" and I made around 300k Plat selling it off to lower levels outside of Karnor's Castle. I remember buffing up a huge group of lower levels that wanting to kill the dragon that roamed in that entire zone..


God I miss those days , nothing has really come close to that (except early vanilla WoW).
 
ultraman7k said:
I agree completely with TMNT on the NES.

I don't know a singly person that beat that game. My friend bought the game, and if we were lucky, we would make it out of the underwater bomb defuse level only to be beaten up by whatever else lay around the corner. I can count the number of times on 1 hand where we made it out of the swimming level.

Needless to say this game changed hand many a time.

Add to the fact that Raphael and Michaelangelo were pretty useless with their super short range...and you almost always had to use Donatello to beat the Rhino dude by crouching at the top of the staircase and attack...

Refer to this list.

http://www.retrojunk.com/content/article/7790/index/

Many a tear was shed playing these games.
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heh... I played TMNT to death on the NES and to this day still never beat it. I got really close... could get to the technodrome all day long, but the amount of jumps you needed to land 'just right' on that stange and considering all your turtles were just about dead at that point, it was a futile effort.
 
FLCLimax said:
what you call learning curve and challenge in EQ is bascally just tedium. i was there, i played(an liked) it too. AC was better imo. besides the obvious tactics you pick up in every single game under the sun, EQ had a low skill ceiling. grind, time sinks, tedium, repetition...that made up the challenge.

the rate of mana regen, how you needed to regen, etc. are all just arbitrary designs, and it pales in comparison to a game with a higher skill ceiling. the next EQ game made will be a disgrace. it'll have more in common with WoW(funny side thought, for all the guys who scramble to defend stuff like swtor, rift,etc...WoW and EQ are worlds apart in so many ways).

once you got all the mechanics squared away and had a full set of skills the skill ceiling wasn't much higher in EQ. AC was much better in this area. EQ is less about being proactive or playing well in the right situation as it is performing the optimal rotation and actions over and over and needing the right gear and buffs to do it.

the major difference between the two was the difference in emphasis on vertical vs horizontal progression and gameplay mechanics.
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EQ was definitely more about learning the game, how to properly group/raid and how best to spend your time. It was less focused on the player, especially early on, like you say. I think, in that respect, it makes for a good RPG. But, it did introduce quite a grind, which can be bothersome to many.

A core element to this type of cRPG is that player skill takes a back seat to the actual character skill/level/gear. This differs in more twitch based aRPG MMO, where player skill means a lot more than the character you are playing - much less focused on playing a "role" defined in the mechanics. Restrictions you may find arbitrary in EQ are likely by design, rather than despite design.

Organizing a 72 man raid and learning an event in EQ isn't anything like I've seen in another MMO. It could be frustrating, but the victory was often very sweet.

Not to imply anything about AC, as I don't have the experience to say.
 
I miss intellect being the mainstream norm of gaming. Games that forced you to think, games that were not blatantly obvious, games where you felt genuine achievement.
 
PoF and PoH in EQ1 were the worse. I've done 24hour PoF raids in the early days of EQ, where the whole raid would wipe after the zone started repopping. Good luck doing CR there when everyone was naked.

Or wiping in PoH and having mobs camp/roam the entrance - equally as bad. Now though Veeshan's Peak? It was not that difficult to reach, and you could just enter the zone and have a necro summon your corpse, so I don't think there was that much risk of losing all your gear there unless you died and did not log back on for another month.
 
Everquest. I lost almost a full level form raids and wipes to learn to kill mobs. It was the best game I played.
 
Sufu said:
It was not that difficult to reach, and you could just enter the zone and have a necro summon your corpse, so I don't think there was that much risk of losing all your gear there unless you died and did not log back on for another month.
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Exits were behind the main dragons and you could not tp/gate out. ;)

You either had to regather the whole raid and win, or your corpse rots.

Also, clearing the zone made you KOS to a couple factions.
 
The cool thing about those old MMO's is how hard they were required you to be on your toes at all times. For example, UO pvp getting ganked when you walked out of the city. I also like the fact that the ganking is kind of roleplay immersion. The guards inside of a city can't protect you on the outside!

EQ was next level amazing. Best game to ever come out, ever. It can't be topped in terms of MMO. The original all the way through Velious. Most of the games come out these days are so determined to be single player games, yet most of them have more subs than EQ ever had. (cough WoW cough)..
Don't believe me? You will never see a 70+ man raid again
 
I never played DAoC so I can't speak from experience on that one.


However I did enjoy EQ pvp the most, I just liked the gameplay of EQ more. PvP was insane giant battles that were between guilds in zones that no one really wanted to be at to begin with. I remember if you disarmed someone and blinded them and they died, if they didn't have a bag slot you could loot their weapon. Man I got so many of those Greater (Something) Swords, forgot what they were called. Loved that weapon, though. Looked so cool. OH and one time in unrest I was grouped with a guy and while he got low on health I just killed him so he wouldn't get the XP loss, but instead I looted him (as he was thanking me in private tells) and stole his FBSS. I was a real motherfucker...
 
Bdonedge said:
The cool thing about those old MMO's is how hard they were required you to be on your toes at all times. For example, UO pvp getting ganked when you walked out of the city. I also like the fact that the ganking is kind of roleplay immersion. The guards inside of a city can't protect you on the outside!

EQ was next level amazing. Best game to ever come out, ever. It can't be topped in terms of MMO. The original all the way through Velious. Most of the games come out these days are so determined to be single player games, yet most of them have more subs than EQ ever had. (cough WoW cough)..
Don't believe me? You will never see a 70+ man raid again
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I've never played EQ or UO, but vanilla WoW PvP was cool. STV was insane because you could get your first quest to go there at around level 30 or so but most of the quests were designed for 40+, and there were always level 60s roaming around looking for easy targets. Lot of epic battles at Blackrock Mountain and outside the Strat gate and other highly-contest areas.

Flying mounts ruined it IMO. The cool thing about vanilla WoW was that you only had a ground mount to get you places, which means you were bound to run into other players. With the introduction of flying mounts you could just fly from quest to quest, finish your objectives and then fly out. I guess people complained about getting ganked or whatnot but I just feel like flying mounts took the immersion out of it as you could basically level up completely solo without ever running into or talking to another person. People who complain about getting ganked should have thought twice before rolling on a PvP server anyway.
 
Hah. I had TMNT on the Commodore 64. That game's DRM was two pages of codes in the game's manual...printed on really dark brown paper so photocopying was not viable. You had to put in one of the four-digit codes when the game gave you the co-ordinates for the code it wanted.
 
After the years of Quake, my friends and me went to EQ and we loved it. We loved that it was hard and it was so new. No one really knew what was going on early on. Grind was just "the game" at the time. I remember foundly seeing someone with a new axe and everyone would crowd around the person aweing at the new model of a weapon, lol. I played a rogue primarily in EQ and it hard a large learning curve and you could always spot power levelers since they never knew how to play them properly.
It was funny in the early days since the game was called Ever"quest" but for a long time we never even knew how to quest in it, lol. The "Con's" in that game were so evil. I remember seeing my first "green" gnoll at level 14 and it wiping almost all of us out in "highhold" or whatever that zone was called. We were all like WTF!
 
Anything that takes any skill basically, biggest market right now is the casual market and they shy away from skill based games and more towards skill capped games where they can win simply because it's their turn to.

We've seen FPS gaming go from the days of Quake where score and wins correlate tightly with skill and effort made, to games like TF2 where you can randomly crit because basically "it's your turn" and kill an entire corridor of enemies that you wouldn't otherwise have a hope of killing.

Most genres have been effected now, not just FPS just look at the history of dumbing down games from CoD -> CoD:MW, from SupCom to SupCom2, from DAO to DA2, they're all getting dumber, easier and targeted at casual gamers.
 
defiant007 said:
Battletoads.....that fucking hover bike level was impossible to beat.
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Came here to say this. Battletoads was a son of a bitch. I agree with a few other games mentioned so far also. Soloman's Key and TMNT were bastards as well.
 
Amaroth said:
Please explain. The only learning curve applied to bunny hopping. One of the coolest exploits/bug in ANY GAME.
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He was probably thinking about learning strategies for scrimming or recoil management for the guns. I played the shit out of CS. Miss the good times late night scrimming with my dorm mates. I've played other FPS but nothing ever felt as right as the way CS ran. Even CS source or CS GO.
 
socK said:
how does regenerating health help you when you die instantly? playing on veteran is literally more luck based than anything.
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I agree with this; there were parts of the game with very small margin for error on veteran difficulty. The other two modern warfare games were much easier on the same difficulty. However, I still wouldn't mind replaying the campaign, especially on a lower difficulty.
 
I always found that in shooter games, when there are allies around (NPC's) that they never get shot as much as you do. It's kind of silly to have the world shooting at you. Sometimes the only difference in the difficulty is that enemies shoot more precisely at you, and unrealistically quicker. It's annoying as hell.
 
And I disagree with the people saying old NES/SNES/Sega Platformers. Those seem to be making a comeback lately and have been tough just the same.
 
QuakeWorld, Quake 3 and CPMA, Quake Live...

I just don't see this type of game becoming the forefront of FPS anymore. It seems people just don't like the difficulty level of game anymore. To me they are still the most skilled FPS I have ever played.
 
dr.stevil said:
heh... I played TMNT to death on the NES and to this day still never beat it. I got really close... could get to the technodrome all day long, but the amount of jumps you needed to land 'just right' on that stange and considering all your turtles were just about dead at that point, it was a futile effort.
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I got in on the PC and i had to hack the save file to get past the little jump in the sewer. I kept trying for over a month! I finally gave up and opened it up on PCTools and moved my character 10 units to the right. Only then was i able to finish it.

What was the point of having four turtles when the only useful one was Donatello?
 
zacrobmer said:
This is one thing I loath about pretty much all modern MMO's along with most RPGS these days. God forbid someone having to actually read or listen to where the quest giver is telling you to go. The gimmee kids must have a an arrow or fucking sparkly path to lead them to exactly where they have to go; they may as well add an instant teleport button and complete quest clicker to help them out.
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I have to disagree with this. Not the instant teleport thing of course, but having the ability to get something like that isn't bad either. (IE: Ultima Online with teleport/portals)

But back on to what I was talking about... the quest giver icon. I think this is something that should be in MMOs. No MMO has ever really given me a quest that makes me go, that's interesting, and made me want to engage and learn more. I tried to do so in Dragon's Nest but I gave up after the mundane story was exposed extremely early on. (Though there was an instance where I found a character I really liked and I read through all of her dialogue)

MMOs are all about grinding now, go on, make a character and grind the living shit out of him til you hit endgame levels and that's where the "fun" begins. Which is actually more grinding but with other people.

Though I did enjoy the sequences in DCUO though. They were pretty fun. Then again, I felt that game was less of a grinder at times because of those sequences.

Quests like "kill 10 goblins" is abundant in MMOs and horridly uninteresting. What needs to be done to actually make people enjoy the story by making things matter. Unfortunately, that'll never happen... again.

I felt UO had one of the least grinds, which is why I loved it so much back then. It was also a "make your own story" sort of deal, rather than following a pre-laid path that may or may not interest you. More likely the latter, which stems out to people not caring to read.
 
Nice to see all these EQ players. That game really was awesome and difficult, but also stole my life from 1999-2004.

I think the biggest strength of EQs design was the requirement to lean on other players. This also caused a large amount of complaints from the classes couldn't solo or had poor group utility, but it forced you to make friends from an early level.

I think players now just don't want to accept their character having any weakness. In some ways imbalance is poor design, but it also adds some character. The struggles you face become the stories you remember because you felt like you accomplished something when you got it.

I'd love to see the next installment of EQ harken back to this a little bit, but if it ever becomes anything other than vaporware I expect it to steal heavily from WoW.
 
Adam.C said:
It seems people just don't like the difficulty level of game anymore. To me they are still the most skilled FPS I have ever played.
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I would debate that. The kiddos play the games available to them, regardless of weather they are difficult or dumbed down to the lowest denominator.

Make difficult games again and they WOULD play them, and they would eventually enjoy playing them as well as the challenge they provided. Promote such games instead and I promise we'd eventually see a change, and a change for the better.

If I didn't know any better I would say that all the big game developers deliberately were dumbing the kids down.
 
EQ won't be made again. I played a magician and it almost stole my life from 2000-2005. I played in a high end raid guild and oh my 72 man raids on things. I remember using the Frozen Jebus to tackle the Avatar of War in Velious. They went and nerfed it right after we did it. We actually finished Velious before SoL came out by a day. We were stoked. SoL was ok but lord did I hate being a mod rod ho. PoP was the best expansion I think that game ever had.

But that was all later one after I knew how to play. Starting out in Crushbone...if you died in a zone and couldn't get back to your body you had to /consent someone to drag your corpse. Consenting them also allowed them to loot your corpse if they wanted so you were like...should I or shouldn't I? It led to some good community though. Losing so much xp on a death was ligh omg nooooo! I once paid 5K plat for a res out in the back assward part of Kunark it sucked so bad.
 
The critical and commercial success of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls - and also the complete failure of the newly-noobified Ninja Gaiden game both critically and commercially - does suggest a market for challenging games is there.
 
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