ITT actual examples of artificial difficulty

CoD: WaW on Veteran.
The grenade indicator gives me PTSD.

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It does if you crouch/find the sweet spot. You'll take some damage but you can get HP easily from a medic I think.
Wait for shooting to stop for a few seconds then move to the next piece of cover. Also don't be an idiot and run for cover that isn't straight ahead of you.
Honestly it's not that bad if you just take it easy and make sure to snipe the faggots once you clear the mine field.

DS2 is shit for so many other reasons than the occasional hitbox fuckup.

Holy shit was it that bad?

I've tried. I played the game years ago and had trouble but beat it and now no matter what I try I can't. I try going left right and center and get mowed down. I know there are water decals showing bullet trails but as soon as I come out the cover I get shredded. And the fog prevents me from sniping gunners.

Wait for a few seconds before you leave the boat. Your guys should die and then when they fall you should make a b-line for the nearest cover. And I said to snipe them once you pass the mine field. You should see them, their not in the concrete holds their just gunners on the hill.

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To be fair on that first one, when the mimic emerges from the chest it does a wide sweeping arc at about a 200 degree angle from the front of the chest with both arms so if you're standing to the side of it you will still be grabbed.

A personal favorite of mine, Empire at War, no matter what you do, the enemy has infinite resources, you can literally take over the galaxy and the enemy will always have a max level space station and will always be able to build capital ships, you will always have to defend your routes against armies every 3-5 minutes.

Sonic and All Stars Racing Transformed comes to mind, the game before even had the rubber band option switch so it felt way more balanced, but SASRT is full of bullcrap.

Most SNK bosses with their high priority and low recovery moves, like Igniz.

It is worse than you can ever imagine, the re-release didn't fix anything and actually added more stupid ganks on regular areas and infested them on the DLC, there is this segment on the Crown of the Iron King area where you find not 1 but 5 dark spirits, these, unlike DS1 don't follow any PvP rules, they can have high poise and stamina even if they have robes, they can have impossible spell setups for any normal player that reaches the area, specially considering Soul Memory should stop someone from invading lower level players.

In DS1 you could just hit the mimic from behind, in DS2 you can hit mimics from behind and you will teleport in front of them so they eat you.

Yeah, THAT'S some bullshit. Also when you roll through their grab and then get teleported 5 foot to their face to be eaten.

In DS2 the evade maneuver is broken and relies on the AGL status, you can try escaping the same attack twice with precise timing under 110 AGL and you will get a completely different result, and even when you have the best AGL possible there are attacks that linger for a full second dealing damage, not just grabs, as shown above there are shockwaves, big hitboxes and even swings (Ruin Sentinels do that), stone soldiers in Drangleic Castle can have infinite stamina and Drakekeepers in Dragon Shrine have insane cancels, you literally never know when to safely attack since they become unpredictable.

Do you know how the evading works in DS3? I've been playing DS1 for so long that I'm guffing up.

You have plenty of I frames in DS3 and there's a ring that gives you even more so dodging is easier than its ever been. Just work on the timing and you'll be fine

Nope, haven't played it, I am waiting for the inevitable complete edition release, if anything I know that in DS3 poise no longer works as it used to be in DS1 (it barely works on DS2 for players)

I think I'm just not used to the attack then or something. I've been doing PvE in DS1 for so long that suddenly new enemies are throwing me off or something.

just press circle real hard

It's an easy way to raise the skill ceiling. Personally, I think it's alright if you deliberately choose to play on a high difficulty, but some games have "dynamic AI" that will start out at "CPU level 0" and raise the difficulty curve as you kick the CPU's ass.

It's not so much of a big deal, I guess, because fighting games are made to play against actual people. It's more interesting that way, anyway.

Chalice dungeons.

Allied Assault D-Day reminds me how mediocre the D-Day mission in Company of Heroes is. It tries to pull off the same Cover2Cover effect but since you can just grab all your soldiers on the beach and charge them at the seawall it loses the impact.

The dungeons themselves?
No.
The late dungeon bosses?
Not exactly, it's just the same problem DaS2 had, fucked hitboxes.
The main game bosses don't have it (BB has actually really fucking good hitboxes for the most part), but some of the chalice dungeons bosses do have it, and that's what kills you.
Biggest offenders being the flaming dog, and the headless huge beast.

Just the bosses tho, if you're dying DURING the dungeons, even the cursed dungeons, you just need to git gud.
By the end i was doing that shit half focoused while watching TV shows.

The worst offender IMO is

You are full of shit, cover does protect you from damage and you can run from cover to cover without dying.

Is this fucking bait?

Mario Kart where if you're in the lead too long your opponents will get that insta-kill on you so you lose your lead.

is there a more difficult version of that guy in later dungeons? i dont remeber him being very hard when i fought him, the old fag with the sickles gave me more trouble.

So it's just like real life ww2.

Smash Bros is nothing. Literally, especially when the "Luigi Does Nothing" series of videos exists. Fighting games have been doing this bullshit for ages, though. 90's Fightans were especially egregious, sometimes necessitating AI exploits to beat. More recently, you can bait out a poorly spaced cr.hp from SFIV's final boss, and in Tekken Revolution, the computer will repeatedly stuff whatever move you were just about to do with the fastest move they can sneak in. They won't convert it into anything, though, so it just leads to you eating 3 or 4 counterhit jabs before they decide to take a hit.

I've heard so much about how Dark Souls II is shit both on the internet and from my own brother a few years ago and that From Software apparently straight up said they were making III just as an apology to their entire audience.

What the fuck seriously happened to that game?

Shit level design, broken hitboxes and a completely unhinged thrown together story with references that just dont work.

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Level design was shit and hitboxes were beyond broken. Don't forget the fact that Soul Memory and other mistakes like it exists in the game. A personal complaint is the fact that most animations look like ass and I'm not a fan of the general color pallet because something about it looks off.

S O U L M E M O R Y
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That's the only genuinely awful thing about the game. Everything else is secondary.

I thought this was disproven?

You can't be that retarded. Cover does protect you (in fact turns you invincible) if you crouch and there's obvious sound clues indicating that the machine gun fire comes on volleys with a massive delay to move from cover to cover.
I can't phantom there's people this inept browsing this board right now. How do you fucking breath, eat or wipe your ass? Holy shit I remember playing Allied Assault with my cousins when we were 11 years old and only having trouble with the sniper level.

Literally had to use cheat engine to beat them. If the game is going to cheat, so will I.

i know this is b8, but i do use cheat engine when i lose a bajillion souls to something stupid because fuck grinding for 5 minutes to get them again

That has nothing to do with artificial difficulty though.

2spooky4u?

the running animation of the first enemies is raelly stupid, their legs are open like riding a horse and their arms are extended as if hugging a tree, someone just saw such a shit animation and gave the OK to put it in the game at fromsoft

Civilization higher AI difficulties.
They literally just give the AI bonuses instead of coding a good AI.

Holy shit v is fucking casual

It wasn't fun though

Oh hey guys what's up

fucking casual

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Literally everything is an artificial difficulty. Because literally everything challenging about a video game is created artificially.

It had legitimate problems, but artificial difficulty isn't one of them.

Just making an AI that doesn't shit itself is pretty demanding, especially when it has to complete its turns a hundred times faster than the player. No way in hell are they going to make multiple versions for one game. TBH the bonuses are the smallest of civ AIs sins anyway. Out-of-turn bullshit is far worse. Civ 3 AIs trade tech with each other the moment you trade it to one of them, SMAC AIs can rush-buy new defending units if you clear the defenders out of a base (and doesn't even lose progress on whatever it was building), etc.

Nah breh. Artificial difficulty means the odds of success are dominated by something other than your skill level, e.g. dice roll.

It's a lie PCfags started to use when they couldn't play DeS. The only way is gitgut

If you're not going to legitimately try to beat a game, why did you even play it?

That's called RNG and has dick to do with "artificial difficulty" meme.

Technically, they have to all read your inputs to some degree. The AI can't "see" the screen, so it has to react to internal game state. The issue is that they are given an impossible reaction time (reacting before the game state would be visually identifiable by any real player).
Saying "read inputs" like it's a bad thing makes little sense, as good AI reads your input to the same degree.

I abused quick saves so hard that it wound up playing like a level of Hotline Maimi

Later on you do cursed dungeons with half your hp so the flaming dog oneshots you during the rush move.
And the rush move has bugged hitboxes so it hits you like one big rectangle, it's like you're trying to avoid a rathalos rush in MHFU.

user, what is artificial difficulty? The OP post is some casual rambling which smells of bait with half of it being game design and another half solved by not being a retard. There were some examples but RNG isn't really artificial difficulty unless it fucks you up without giving a reasonable chance to recover, level scaling is just a lazy stupid design, so what is artificial difficulty?

It's casual faggot with pretense to be hardcore knee-jerk reaction to not being gud.

Yeah, this game is filled with a lot of bullshit. Even so, the AI is easily fucked with if you use smoke and molotovs. Funnel them into a narrow hallway with a smoke cloud between yourself and them, throw down a molotov just at the entrance, and pick them off as they step out of the smoke. Granted, you can't always do this, but it's possible.

sloppy term, but usually it refers to unfair difficulty

There is shitty difficulty though.
Where nothing in the game changes and it just makes you do 90% less and the enemies have 90% more HP. It's not somehow artificial it's just bullshit.

What most people mean when they say artificial difficulty is "you walk into a room and above you on a ledge you can't see is an instant kill archer who shoots you unless you hug the left wall". It's just a trap that'll get you the first time and never again.

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kys tbh onii-fam

Not the subject of conversation

What Ninja Gaiden 2 does right, it does fucking right, but there are so many things it does wrong and so much bullshit. It's an inferior sequel to NG:Black. Don't try telling that to Ninja Gaiden-fags though, they'll puff up their cheeks, clench their fists, and stomp their little feet and cry that you just need to get good.

God I hate this. Back in the '90s in the arcade fighting game scene we called this "machi-style" borrowing the phrase from Japan. It means "matching-style" and is literally what you described. Some players just got good at not playing the game but rather reacting to/matching your button presses.We had a local guy that would glance at his opponents' hands to see which buttons they were pressing.

sure does smell casual up in here

S-source?

Are you retarded by any chance?

4 in mag/Dex and 1 in speed will stil make your DPS 4 times better then anything in the game at that point, stop being shit.

An example of artificial difficulty would just be like with the Z difficulties in Budokai 3 story mode.
The main game even on Very hard stops level scaling at around 35, Z1 starts at 50 and goes to 65, Z2 starts at 70 and goes to 85, Z3 starts at 90 and ends at the cap all while having the same AI as very hard. Did all of them one after another and your end game level is like 63 by the end
Nothing about the game was made harder mechanically, they just take more to die and hit for harder, if you could beat the AI with no problem before nothing's changed.

Only the cursed Watchdog of the Old Lords strikes me as a bit artificial because of how silly one or two of his hitboxes are coupled with the health penalty in that dungeon. Nothing else in the dungeons jumps out to me as being particularly unfair.

You fight another Watchdog of the Old Lords in a dungeon that has the 'cursed' effect turned on, which automatically cuts your health in half. As a result, all but one of his attacks one-shot you, and this coupled with some of his hitboxes being a bit hokey makes him quite notorious.

You hear similar complaints about cursed Amygdala and the headless Bloodletting Beast, but I never had much trouble with either of them personally.

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pretty much when the ai is not on a level playing field and has its own cheats. like spawning full stacks of armies in total war. those things that are pretty much needed when you get good enough at a game because making an ai good is fucking hard so the next best thing is giving it some cheats to try and level the field

exactly

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I think when it comes to enemies, artificial difficulty would mean enemies not following the in-game rules so to speak.
For example in Demon's souls in 5-2 you get invaded by and npc phantom, she can move in the swamp with no penalties, neither poison nor mobility reduction, you or any summoned or invading phantoms do suffer from it.

with all that i said rubberbanding in racing games pisses me off because then that just forces me to stay in 2nd place till the last lap because otherwise the faggots will just shoot past me and fuck up my run if i go too fast

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Isn't it just lazy cheating AI? Instead of making good AI like in JA2 1.13 that doesn't act stupid they remove penalties so it can act stupid and add extra bonuses because it's too stupid to not get abused by player. To me artificial difficulty sounds like "not real difficulty", just some bullshit to make player fail without giving player a (controlled) chance not to fail.

Okay, that's some bullshit.

Yes it is bait. Haven't you noticed the cuckchan influx in the recent months?

The only way to make threads on cuck/v/ is to bait. It wasn't like that before over here.

it is lazy but some games is a lot harder to make ai than other games and when you're on a time limit you have to make the choice of trying to make the ai good which may turn out bad or even broken depending on your coding skill or cop-out and give it some cheats you know you can finish and balance for difficulty in the time limit for releasing a game

NFS '15 only good aspect is the customization and Amy. It's always online due to shit I give no fucks about And has stymied piracy cracks, the driving physics are like a retarded version of Ridge Racer, it waxes carrot over drifting and Ken Block way too hard like every other game that features them both, and you can't even indulge in the ricing because you only get 5 slots to work with and forgot to put in a My Cars thing again.

But even then Codemasters is even worse in Rubberbanding asshole. I haven't played a single game of theirs where setting it higher then medium causes the AI to rocket ahead even when I'm in a good car.

In many of the 2D Worms games, upping the difficulty doesn't actually make the bot worms any "smarter". They can still only properly use a few different weapons, and are pretty much lost at being able to move from the spot they spawn at. The only thing that does change is they become motherfucking hackers with weapon accuracy. They can fire a bazooka shot from across the map into a gale wind, have the shell turn around and fly backwards, thread the needle through a two-pixel gap in the terrain, and hit your worm perfectly, for maximum possible damage.

I'd be willing to bet money it's something by Kuroodod. You can find all his stuff on e621.

You really are just fucking terrible at the game

what a pussy

1st try SL1 with a heather shield+handaxe. Took about 15 minutes though

This is nothing. I beat the entire game with both hands tied behind my back, using my cock as the only controller input.

Wow user, are you serious?

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It's a trash boss fight half of which entirely revolves around abusing how bad the enemy pathfinding is, I don't think it's something to be proud of

Everything after DaS1 was a mistake.

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Nigger you don't know shit. Go back to the old Sinjar, where there was almost no cover leading up to A, and in early versions there wasn't even cover in the spawn. There was nearly no cover going to B either, you either took the street and made sure you had enough smoke and the bridge suppressed or run past double walls and hope nobody shoots at you because you're out in the open for a 30 second sprint. The "new" Sinjar is total pussy shit. The old sinjar was a total INS curbstomp for all 24 waves at least 75% of the time, unless you managed to get a USMC team that could git gud.

Also it's funny that you complain about AI having RPGs because it's a single shot piece of shit that's near-worthless, there used to be an RPG class that would get 4 full rockets, and there was a resupply crate a 15-second run away from A. With no cover in A besides the buildings (only one accessable from the USMC side) and the pickup truck and porta potty in the road, you could completely clear out the objective cap area with a single rocket.

I absolutely hate rubber banding so much.

It's not too hard, you just got to really make sure you start killing your enemies before they start throwing grenades. And once they do you have to make sure you throw them back.

It's not artificial difficulty, it's shit game design.

"True difficulty" as you want it would be increasing the complexity of enemy patterns and level design.

The padding that you don't like is just plain bad game design. Call it what it is.

"Artificial difficulty" is a type of "shit game design". There's nothing wrong with being specific. We're talking about a blown head gasket and you're saying, "It's not a blown head gasket, it's a bad engine!" which, while still technically correct, honestly just makes you sound like you don't know what you're talking about.

Considering that there is a guy who beat DS1 on a guitar, on drums and on motherfucking voice control, I'd say there is a chance there is a guy who beat it with his cock.

How the fuck is it possible for a driver to be so fast? I can drive a fully upgraded car and not fuck up one turn, yet by the end she is always there along with the cunt Jack. Jack is easily beatable, but this bitch always comes back.

When the AI doesn't have to follow the same rules as the player.
That's literally artificial difficulty.
I'm talking about resources, skills, abilities, gameplay mechanics and so on so forth.

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No, it's shitty logic and bad application of words.

ei all gameplay is "artificial difficulty" because all of it is man made.

It's like calling the fine attention to detail in MGS games "technology."

You sound like a fucking retard. Words have definitions for a reason. Stop talking like a nigger.

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Smash 4 is the worst by far about this. The AI perfect shields everything constantly, even jabs. They ALWAYS air dodge the exact frame an attack would connect with them in midair. Yet they can't tech the ground to save their lives, leading to a lot of free hits.
Also, in Classic mode on high difficulty they get huge handicaps. In a 2-on-2 battle your partner is totally braindead, so you're now trying to fight two AI with perfect reflexes who are much stronger than you and can grab all the items first.

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RNG

Yes, I agree. It's like calling weird and cheap-looking way to draw things in animated media "quality". Quality is a measure of excellence or a state of being free from defects, deficiencies and significant variations.

Or, for example, calling somebody's post cancer. That is silly because cancer is a malignant tumor resulting from abnormal and uncontrolled division of cells.

I, for one, am tired of people accusing OP of being a faggot when the poster hasn't expressed any homosexual tendencies. Even in one of the gay-friendly countries like the US the gay population is only around one percent. So, the likelyhood of OP indeed being a faggot is tremendously tiny.
See, words have meanings for a reason, and whenever multiple words become a term after years of active usage (i.e. imaginary numbers, which are not imaginary at all), this is wrong and should be changed back immediately.

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Any Souls game

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this.

Why

It only annoys me in ace combat.
Nothing felt as good as landing that last missile and getting the "neutralized" message. Then the pilot started calling out over the radio to the other two planes as he turned around and started limping away, right as I lined up and shot another two missiles, blowing his aircraft apart in mid air. The least they could do is make the aces fly believable aircraft, I don't believe it for a fucking second.

I understand the need for new language to quickly explain things, but using something like artificial difficulty is obtuse and confusing.

Having to consult fucking urban dictionary for every new wordism you millennial fucks make up is stupid annoying waste of time that defeats the purpose of having a new word to quickly get across a concept.

Make everything relative and you kill all meaning.

The term was used on imageboards for at least three years and has become the norm. If you can't understand what is being said you need to lurk more. That's the way it's been and that's the way it is supposed to be.

Looks like your autism's pretty severe, may as well kill yourself.

Enemy tracking is absolutely insane in DS2. There's almost no point in rolling in that game because of this so the only way to play is to go bitch mode with your shield up constantly and land a few hits when they stop attacking. Most of the Boss battles are also just weak bosses but they add in 2 or 3 of them to make them harder. None of the levels are well designed or make any clear indication of where you are supposed to go next.

The game is a complete mess.

You're dumb and obnoxious. Lurk more.

I was there for it on 4chv and I thought it was fucking stupid then.

Artificial difficultly was a stupid troll meme that came around the same time that so dumbfuck said there was no such thing as fun.

You're bringing 4ch cancer here and I don't like it. Call it autism all you want. Get the fuck off my board.

I never did beat him in UMK3…
Not without cheesing him with Rain's Water Control + Uppercut - ad nauseam.

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Play Flatout 2 instead. Same game, less bullshit.

Speak for yourself, faggot. I rejected 4ch, not the other way around.

You probably don't even know why we left.

Yeah, I also enjoyed Flatout 2's soundtrack way more.

I bet you're some 17 year old loser pretending to be an oldfag because he reads Encyclopedia Dramatica.

Add 10 years. I hate you, get out.

Stuff like absurd enemy placement, input reading, overpowered attacks with special properties, that make the game stop being about skill to replace it with bullshit

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I understand that the point of arcade games were to steal money from shildren with cheap bullshit, but MK2 took it to another level.
I have literally never beaten this game with a single character and instead only played against human beings.
MK3 is alright.

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bet it took you more than one try to beat them, faggot

Yes, it did. My first attempt was deconstructing the controller and wiring all the buttons into a dildo, and then shoving the thing up my ass and using kegals as the control input. It was all going pretty well for a while, until I had a poorly-timed prostate orgasm. While the clenching made the PC flail around hilariously, it also got him killed. Whoops.

I, dare you.

By using the word "artificial" it suggests a level of difficulty that feels unnatural or arbitrary when playing the game. Having every 3rd bullet you fire from your gun only do half as much damage or giving a seemingly normal enemy an absurd amount of health would be example of unnatural difficulty. A better term for it would be "Fake Difficulty" or "Lazy Difficulty", since most of the time it's a result of the devs being too lazy or stupid to make the game genuinely challenging.

Off the top of my head, it'd be considered something like the enemy has shit AI in a strategy game, but gets a ton of advantage like more units or more damage and resistance and can easily fuck you over

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I'd never implement bullshit like hit chance unless there were actual obstacles or protection that could make something like that feasible.

Instead RNG + position for the most part exclusively decides just how effective a blow will be, never the possibility of missing when you're right fucking next to them.

I've been playing it Let It Die recently

And yet I'm still playing it because I lack sense.

Are you seriously this bad at videogames, nigger?