"It's not hard if you know what you're doing" is not a valid argument

t. Shitter who can't complete DS2

I was kidding, I personally like rune dragons more than vorkath though

Doom 2 on Nightmare.
I Wanna Be the Boshy

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Shit, why is it upside down? I forgot to crop it too

This thread is retardation

Well obviously if you've learned all there is to learn about a game there's not going to be anything left in it for you to learn (i.e. that'll challenge you.) Who've you even been talking to who's been shitposting at you like that?

look at this dumbass lmao

Most of the time I only hear that when it comes to games with autistic UI designs, or a total newbie to something like a point and click adventure game where the difficulty is trying to mind read the developers on how to solve the puzzles laid out for you so yes I do consider it a valid argument.

This has to be intentional

1/8000 drop

I really can't be arsed to play a 120 hour JRPG twice because of esoteric missable shit that locks out fun content later in the game.

If the difficulty is purely artificial and you need pure luck to win, it won't matter how good you are. For instance, fighting games where the ai cheats and uses inputs to fight you.

Even in those cases you'll still have autists who go through great lengths to crack the AI by observing certain patterns that can be abused. For example the old Mortal Kombat games, especially Trilogy, are particularly notorious for blatant cheating and input-reading AI even at lower levels of difficulty, but someone figured out that jumping backwards
and doing a kicks always makes the AI fire their projectile for example, in SoulCalibur II there are some strings or moves which the AI just doesn't block no matter what difficulty you play on, like Nightmare's 66B

It is the ONLY valid argument.
You play a game to learn it's challenges and surpass them. When you learn enough, you know what you are doing and it is not hard (or so hard) anymore.
"It's not hard if you know what you're doing" is the perfect definition of a video game.

There are a handful of dungeon crawlers that take several years to beat, even with a wiki. You have to learn everything about the game to beat them without resorting to cheating and save scumming. If you want a difficult game where you must rely on skill and situational awareness rather than knowledge, then give Deathtrap Dungeon a try.

Or someone who's made the mistake of getting a full time job and having two children. kill me

What is the definitive hardest video game ever?

Any arcade game with one coin.

I can understand having this point of view when you only play games that don't require hand-eye coordination skill.

play shooting games you casual

you don't need video games any more

Is OP still a faggot after 3+ threads?

Difficulty is only relevant when you're talking about a new player. Play the hardest game in the world a few times and it'll be a cakewalk. This is why so many people say that Souls games are easy as shit - all you need to do is git gud and then they're fucking easy.
This, in a nutshell, is why there's no such thing as "difficulty" in games. There's just pros and noobs.

Real difficulty would be a game that intelligently increases the challenge relative to your skill, so you never feel like you're improving. You think you've figured out how to reach the goal, and that's when the goalposts move. That'd be actual difficulty.

If you have less time to play games, that is all the more reason to spend that time playing good games. A twelve hour story with easy combat and mindless puzzles is always a waste of your time.

And I got a vissy from Vorkath

Battletoads with 2 players.

The fuck are you trying to say here?

Try playing a game with actual gameplay, cuck.

Of course it is.
That said, using wikis obviously doesn't count.

You mean within the same genre? All those walking sims do nothing to prepare you for baby's first 2D side-scrolling shooter.

That's bullshit. Maybe in today's games, which lead you all the way through you can do them easy-mode. But, let's take Warcraft 3 for instance, or Gothic.
Even if you know the basics of the RTS genre or the RPG genre, you still have to play a lot in order to practice. There are too much rules for you to learn beforehand and even iof you do, you will still have a hard time using them in-game.
Or let's take CoD for instance, multiplayer. You need to git gud to play and that's for any multiplayer game really.
You talk out of your ass, you need skill and experience to play good games, that's what they're for. To feel a sense of accomplishment while you learned the game. Maybe the modern ones give you instant gratification, but anyone who want's that doesn't really play games, he masturbates with them

After a long time of bullshitting on my old machine (crashes, not even starting, controller problems, etc) I got Dark Souls (one) working perfectly on my new machine. Holy shit it's frustrating as fuck almost right from the start, but every time I realized I just wasn't using the right things. Things like never using the health potions (habit of being frugal, which isn't necessary), bombs, or not acquiring ranged weapons. It gets a lot easier fast if you know what there is, how to use it, and where to get it. It may still change later on though.

Games that truly remain challenging after multiple tries are the multiplayer ones.

this

Kaizo platformers can be mastered but it takes more than 3 playthroughs. Same goes for shmups and a lot of arcade games. Playing through them 3 times is usually enough to win by dumb luck but there's still difficulty present.

I'm going to play that shit, I've put it off way too long.

Every fucking playthrough, EVERY SINGLE TIME this cock gobbler gives me trouble with his last phase.

What you get out of a video game all depends on what you choose to get out of it. You can choose to breeze through all the Zelda games with an online walkthrough. You can also choose to beat the game with 3 hearts.

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La-Mulana without a guide.

It's a sensible argument, if not a good one. There are fundamentally two ways a game can be "difficult:" (1) you don't have enough knowledge, or (2) you don't have enough skill. In a general sense every game has at least some combination of both: in order to play a game using a controller, for example, you need both the knowledge of how to use said controller and the skill to do so that you gain from experience. Grand strategy games are a great example of (1): they require almost no skill (you point and click on things under no time constraints) but a lot of knowledge about how the game works. Rhythm games are pure (2): you can learn all game mechanics in 30 seconds and the curve is based entirely on skill. Shmups/bullet hells are also mostly (2).

So when someone says a game "isn't really hard once you know what you're doing," they're rejecting (1) as genuine difficulty and implying that only (2) is "real" difficulty. I personally that's a silly opinion to have, but it's not nonsensical.

nah

Of course it is.

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Nah i beat it in high school and i'm a retard. Ain't that hard after you get used to the movements you're supposed to make.

Puzzles in some games, especially adventure or survival horror games. Some puzzles are so elaborate and overcomplicated and ridiculous that you can't solve them without outside the game help. That's how they roped youngsters into buying strategy-guides.

Pottery

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This sums up rhythm games very well, constant mental battle. Did I hit my ceiling already? Will my fingers get any faster from this point on?

Depends on game, as shown by video.

Honestly, though, what you're really asking OP is "why don't casuals rationally think, calculate, plan, predict and react when playing vidya in genre they have before", and the answer is that most people don't think when they do things.

Can't play the game for you. If knowing things about the game removes any and all challenge immediately, the game might not be good.

The Dominions series.
Good fucking luck.

It does for Point and Click adventures and many other puzzlers.

its said that those who pinkpost have only half a brain

"It's hard if you don't know what you're doing" is even dumber because it's effectively a tautology. Therefore Hardness can only be measured next to someone who knows what they are doing.

I haven't beaten it yet, but Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption is very difficult.

The one time a guide is fair game in that game is getting to Hell. Anything else is kind of fair, even if it means reloading at a specific checkpoint like with that one weights puzzle.

Depends on the build of your characters. Maximizing damage with feral claws can make the game easy.

Why bother exploring the potential of any game or creating your own gameplay style and strategy when you can just read everything on a wiki, or better yet be a good goy and buy a strategy guide?

Probably not, but there's not so many vydia that is worth massive amounts of playthroughs. I noticed this because I have some faulty motor skills and reflexes and even dark souls became a cakewalk after a while.

Dark Souls

Rocket Knight Adventures on Crazy Hard

If a video game is fair then it won't be hard, the idea that vidya can be hard comes from casuals who don't understand the idea of learning mechanics and getting better at a game. The only games that are truly hard are those which are unfair.

Any online PvP ranked game. These make "hardcore gamers" cry.

Something I noticed about games that get played a ton is everyone becomes so aware of everything in the game that it boils down to simply going through predetermined motions rather than playing the game. Maybe doing a goofy unconventional run with an item everyone ignores because it's useless (like the whip in dark souls) but would add some extra challenge. Furthermore games nowadays just copy previous games are water them down so even if you play a new game you still can identify what is and isn't useless.

I originally intended this to be for multiplayer, because… e-sports is literally everything I just discussed, but the more I think about it the more I realize it has bled into every other game simply because devs just copy eachother.

The perfect example. Stealth games. You have to play the majority of them either ghosting, non-lethal or ignoring half the tools, because if you play something like splinter cell you will immediately realize that 30 pistol shots is enough to kill everyone in the level and suddenly the game becomes easy mode. There are exceptions like the original Thief that threw zombies and all sorts of other shit that was hard to deal with at you, but it's so against what everyone traditionally wants in a stealth game that they write it off and shill Thief 2 (which has giant hard to kill robots which still diverts enough from the norm)

Definitely agree with regards to multiplayer games. It pays to be an early adopter and enjoy games before the meta develops. Not sure I agree about single player games though. I know which effect you're talking about but you can solve it with better game design and anticipating ways to break your systems before the players do. Most devs are just shit and can't into game design or thinking like a player, but if you design a game well, you should only get the meta effect if you're a faggot and look up guides. You can never stop people from doing that, but you can at least discourage it by avoiding the kind of obtuse bullshit that prompts people to look up guides in the first place.

Turn-based RPGs where the enemies get ridiculous stat boosts on hard mode.

the only good thing to come out of that game was the porn of the female protagonist

Never played it but I instantly remembered the name due to this.

What was wrong with Cybersluts again? I remember most here liking it a lot and then suddenly after the next game got announced people said it was shit except for waifus or something along those lines.

It's not really the fault of developers but more of how games, not only video games but tabletop games are constructed in general. Every game, although it might involve fast reaction times from the player, basically involves the same type of thinking that exists in chess whether to solve problems created by developers or by real players. There is always the most effective way of doing things and once it is discovered, other options become obsolete. All human-made games are basically more complex versions of tic-tac-toe.

The english was machine translation tier at far too many points and some faggots were extremely butthurt about no female pronouns for female protagonist, but otherwise a solid game.

Is this localization fuckery, or just the nips being lazy?

It’s bad regardless of it being a mistake from the nips or not. The localization team should have caught it and fixed it.

Why the fuck were you playing a Japanese game in English to begin with? And how does that reflect the quality of the actual game?

I'm too apathetic to learn nip.

Lazyness, I assume. Japs have one size fits all pronouns and whoever translated this game probably did exactly that and just that. Translate the jap text without adding extra lines for the female option.

If video games are enough of your life for you to come here, you owe it to yourself to learn enough to play vidya at least.

if you're playing a game with shitty design choices like demon's souls, then sure. if you're playing something like quake, no.

You can knock out zombies and haunts.

ADOM

That game is the hardest but fairest roguelike I know, while also being one that isn't rendered trivial by spoilers. The best players can win not just often, but extremely quickly. Everyone else can struggle for ages. I know many good gamers who have played it for over a decade and never beaten it once.

Oh and spoilers help somewhat but not THAT much, since *everyone* uses the Guidebook, and they still get their ass kicked.

I prefer Nethack myself. Although I'm not sure whether OP meant 3+ games in a franchise or 3+ playthroughs of a single game, shmups are still difficult after many of either.

True. I suppose it's really an issue of the state of the industry being shit. Not to mention you have garbage like Extra Credits making game dev guides that literally just list every trope and cliche, encouraging people to copy them.

The problem is we're in an industry that encourages it with shit like e-sports and speedrunning.

They're always in situations that make them hard to deal with. Zombies are always grouped up. Haunts are either grouped up or in areas with tile or lots of light.

The main difference is that you're not forced in any way to go with "the most effective strategy™" if the game strictly encourages speedrunning because ti's a singleplayer experience (unless you have the tism but that's on you) and even then the main argument doesn't hold true at all, if someone finds another less than optimal way to beat the game that happens to be fun to play or add interesting challenges people will run that too
eSport is another matter entirely since it's a big chunk of the game itself you can't enjoy anymore once metafags take over, generally made worse with the facts that those games tend to be MP only and that every fucking tryhard on the planet will yell at you if you don't play the meta.

I'm fairly framilar with the dungeon crawler genre and I cant think of any of them that take several years to beat. I even ascended in nethack in less than a year. List dungeon crawlers that take several years to beat even with a wiki.

Goes back to
In an industry where everyone copies you can pretty much immediately identify what is and isn't viable, and doing unconventional way might be more challenging but not so much fun. I never found ghosting or ignoring half the features in stealth games fun, but it's pretty much the only way to play them because the game becomes a breeze otherwise. The idea that I'm only getting half of what the devs put in or I'm having to play with artificial limitations I put on myself to not breeze through ruins it for me.

It doesn't matter how you play the game if the game is built and designed from the ground up from a and around the genre's meta.

Your mileage may vary since you have already beat Nethack. ToME is around the same difficulty level. ADOM is slightly above. You can see how you do with Mordor: Depths of Dejanol or Demise: Ascension.

I still don't see meta constraining SP experience anywhere near as much as it does with MP, even if you ignore non-gameplay factor for MP (peer pressure etc)
Especially when you cite the genre that plays the most around the idea of giving you many tools but rewarding you for using as little of those as possible and even your counter example in that genre still is guilty of it >inb4 implications killing / blackjacking everything in Thief isn't viable and makes things exponentially easier additionally ghosting in Thief is tedious as fuck compared to a lot of other games so even restricting yourself isn't much help in that case unlike Hitman or MGS2/3.

user, different people have different idea of how they should play a certain type of game, devs know that fact and will put things in their games that aren't meant to be liked by everyone, meaning that no matter how hard you try you will never experience everything the devs intended people to experience, unless the game is simplistic as fuck.
Thinking otherwise is just gonna hurt your enjoyment of every game in the long run, and if you can't enjoy a game in any form then you should just not play it (unless your only problem is that you think you're missing out on some hypothetical experience by playing the way you feel will make you enjoy the game best)

I originally was talking about MP but I am starting to see slight parallels in SP.

I know not everything the devs add should be enjoyed, but if the entire game is structured around them the game just isn't fun. Like dishonored. First attempt at playing it I quit because of how hilariously OP blink was and how it trivialized everything. Later I still wanted to play a first person stealth game so I fired it up against but ignored the abilities. It made it more fun but subconsciously I knew the entire time at any second I could teleport to any position I wanted to. Every time I fucked up I would always think "If I just used blink it would be way easier". The entire game is built from the ground up for blink and the abilities as well. The straw that broke the camels back though that made me quit, was how heavily the game incentives you to play passive (and unskipable shitty cutscenes). It just felt like as the game went on the more and more blink would be needed and knowing kills where frowned upon (like in deus ex but not as well done) made the game feel unsatisfying. Maybe I'll fire it up again, but that was a strong case where ignoring half the game and also having the devs tell you to ignore another section of the game ruined it for me.

I used to defend this game, but now i truly see that it's a piece of shit

I remember I use to go to a game forum when splinter cell was turning into the new shit you see today and I could tell from the videos, gameplay choices, etc that it was going to be shit. Only to have people go "YOU SHOULD BUY AND PLAY IT ANYWAYS YOU DON'T KNOW IT'S SHIT IF YOU HAVEN'T EVEN PLAYED IT YET".

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I didn't even know what the other abilities are. I just saw they give you blink straight out of the box.

Yeah not sure. TBH all roguelikes are difficult, although the "consensus" is that Nethack is made significantly easier with spoilers compared to other roguelikes such as ADOM or Crawl. Personally I found ADOM the most difficult enjoyable roguelike for me,, but really this is just a dick waving contest. XD

As far as I'm concerned any roguelike player is solid gold in my book. haha