Can anyone actually give an example of "artificial difficulty"...

Terada is a godtier artist.

A classic example would be Battletoads. You get suckered into 1 hit kills you couldn't possibly have dodged on the first go. Thus, getting better at the game is less "gitting gud" and more "memorizing the obstacle course the same way a mouse gets shocked into not touching a certain wall in his little box."
The classic Castlevanias outside of Haunted Castle provide you with all the tools you need to take on your opposition. The game is slow paced (much like muh dank souls) and also unforgiving in higher levels, but doable with enough practice and learning from your mistakes.

Most roguelikes, because a lot of what happens to you depend on the roll of the dice, you'll get suckered into some bullshit, but a big part of roguelikes is learning how to circumvent the game's bullshit and metagame like a shitter.

Misuse has no bearing over what an expression actually means, though.

A challenge not based on player skills or things like preparation or planning and typically relies on foreknowledge that the player could not account for until they've already experienced it (and typically lost to it) at least once.

True, but my point was that most people don't really know what the fuck they're talking about when they use the term. This thread actually confirmed that there are people with more than two brain cells in their skulls. Might educate a moron or two. Probably won't though

When the games tries to be difficult, but it's just being cheap.

"Artifical difficulty" refers to the concept of an obstacle or mechanic in a game being difficult or impossible to overcome due to factors that don't relate to the player's skill or ability to strategize.

For example: if one was playing a platformer or similar action game that suddenly halted the player's progress until they were able to legitimately win the jackpot of an in-universe slot machine, the obstacle would be an example of artificial difficulty. The outcome of the slot machine being random severely depreciates any sense of reward that the player may have after overcoming it, since it had nothing to do with whether or not the player was skilled at the game. It also has the potential to be an enormous nuisance, in the event that the random number generator's favor does not happen to lie with the player.

On the contrary, if the game presents a slot machine that can be favorably manipulated by the player by means that are conductive to the skills needed for the rest of the game, such as needing to find a switch in the area that rigs the slot machine or using a certain skill of the player character to manipulate the slot machine's outcome, then the slot machine would be a reasonable obstacle and an example of genuine difficulty.

The problem with the term is that it's often used in gaming communities to describe obstacles that are difficult, albeit possible, to overcome with skill. For the sake of context, imagine that a player is running down what appears to be a typical hallway in a 3D action game, when suddenly a boulder appears in front of them and they are forced to escape the hallway in a small window of time to avoid damage or failure. Events such as this are a point of contention when classifying obstacles as "legitimate difficulty" or "artificial difficulty", since the capability of players to react to the given stimuli varies wildly. Ultimately, this depends on the approach that the player is meant to take to the game, but that can be difficult to discern by simply playing the game with no knowledge as to its development or design goals.

Artificial difficulty is anything that can't be overcome by player skill, and that you must explicitly have foreknowledge of to avoid.

A minefield in a strategy game where there have been no minefields before, with no signs around it or warnings from other characters to tell you it's there, is artificially difficult.

However, old-school RPGs like Wizardry and Ultima had shitloads of poison squares, teleportation tiles, trapped treasure chests, etc. Whether or not you could search them before interacting with them depended on the game itself. If you had some way of mitigating the risk, it wasn't artificially difficult. If you had just to stumble forward, then yeah, that was artificial difficulty.

Embed related. You start out in a room in which there are many levers that you must pull in order to open gates that have blocked your passage. There is no time limit, despite that a musical piece has flared which could indicate a sense of urgency, so the player is not pressed for time. The odds are in your favor; there are five levers, and one of them is a trap. There is no way to know which one is a trap, and even if you pull the trap, you'll only receive a minimal amount of damage.

The next room features a water spring that will refill your magic meter, which will allow you to execute a special weapon attack by pressing Triangle. The presence of the water spring is an indication that you need to do something in order to open the door and proceed.

So far, I think these two are reasonable obstacles that don't quite offer any sort of incredibly taxing punishment; in the first room you'll take minimal damage if you choose wrong even when the odds are in your favor, and in the second room there is no chance for failure as you have all the time in the world to put the pieces together and come to a solution without risk of any sort of threat.

The third room is a perfect example of unreasonable difficulty. You walk into a room filled with tiles. The tiles all look similar, and there is no way to understand their function without first interacting with them as far as I can tell; perhaps at some point earlier in the game there was a set of clues that would help you understand how the tiles work but I found no such hint. Even so this would only be considered fair if the hint actually exists and is placed in an obvious location that could be accessed before the player encounters the trap room If the player exits the room and reenters, the pattern of the tiles on the floor will change, which means that you can't memorize a singular pattern and expect to use that solution every time.

The final room involves solving a tile sliding puzzle game. You only have a certain amount of time to solve the puzzle before you fail. If you fail you'll have to start the sequence all over again because there isn't a save point in the final room. This is a tedious punishment for failure, considering the third room with its randomized tiles and the fact that you must watch the unskippable cutscene over and over again simply for the chance at getting to the puzzle.

Elder Scrolls higher difficulty levels only gimps player damage while increasing incoming damage to player

Is this a good example?

I categorize it in ways where it seems like the game needs to resort to cheating or surprise tactics to fuck you over. Where often times the ability to win may seem like a luck of the draw rather than a triumph of skill. I know we're all familiar with video games but let me put this into terms that are far simpler.

Monopoly is a board game that is about 90% artificial difficulty. Your movements are left to the luck of a dice roll and your only inputs most of the time are weather or not to buy a property which if you actually look at the rules says you MUST if you can and it must go up for "auction" if you cant. Other than that, your only other input is if you should enhance your properties, mortgage them, or initiate trade negotiations with another player which is usually fruitless anyway.
Whether or not any of your tactics work is entirely up to the dice roll of you and your opponent. You can have all sorts of enhanced properties but it doesn't mean dick if your opponent(s) never land on them. On top of that, there are the chance and community chest squares which are random sorts of cards that can either help or hinder you.
This game is nothing but artificial difficulty with the illusion of player ability.

Now lets look at a game like Sudoku.
Sudoku is a logic puzzle with clearly defined rules. The difficulty in the game is all in a manner of how many starting numbers you have and their positions but each puzzle by the very rules should be solvable with the right application of logic. There are no wild cards and nothing that suddenly makes the game harder or impossible that your lack of skill/ability isn't the cause of.

Now lets look at a game like Poker.
Poker is that third option where the game looks like its luck of the draw by casual players but the more serious players will tell you its all skill.
Why is that? Surely its got a huge luck component in that you're literally dealing with a shuffled deck of cards, right? Well, no not really. See, poker for the casual is always seen as a per-hand game and thus success or failure is only ever seen on that one dealt hand. For the novice, there is no longer game other than the dealt hand and why would their be? They're not interested in playing more than a couple of hands anyway. For the serious poker player, poker is a long game that isn't over until the last person is left at the table or they're completely out of the ability to place bets themselves. The skill comes in the form that yes, you have a dealt hand, but you don't necessarily have to play with that dealt hand. Bluffing, folding, and all manner of tactics that don't really have to deal with the cards at all. In fact, its entirely possible to win a game of poker without ever having to regard the cards at all and they are, in reality, the last ditch effort to win a round/hand.

Now these three examples will crop up in video games in many ways.
A platformer that has never given any indication of disappearing, crumbling, or invisible platforms and suddenly has them in an area where you could fail the game from falling due to one. (usually classified as trial and error).
A shooter game where the enemies know when to dodge or hide from you because the game is reading when your sights are on the enemy and not because the enemy actually saw you.
An action game that gives you ever indication that all enemies can be blocked in some way and then going up against enemies with unblockable moves.
Any game where foreknowledge of the next area will lead to success that reaches beyond your skill with the game. The old Resident Evil games are actually great examples for this. Knowing starting enemy locations when you enter a new room is magnitudes more powerful for the player than skill with the controls/mechanics of the game.

Diablo 3 and its early Torment difficulty, where the devs came out and straight up admitted that they just took the highest difficulty their testers could barely take and doubled the numbers.

In other words: Difficulty for the sake of difficulty, usually achieved by simple number adjustments.

You mean inferno difficulty? That game had so many absolutely shit design choices im surprised "fuck that loser" still works at blizzard

And these faggots are exactly why the word "artificial difficulty" is meaningless, that pretty much throws everything except a select few mechanics under the entire umbrella and therefore renders the entire point of that word completely moot.

Artificial difficulty is essentially just obstacles or challenges which the player usually cannot solve through logic or what you've learned from the game, instead having to rely on luck, meta knowledge, trial 'n error, and basically shit you couldn't have possibly known beforehand

I wouldn't say that's artificial difficulty as its just lazy difficulty.
Making enemies into damage sponges while the player becomes more brittle just means the player will have to put their skills to task for a longer period of time. You had to dodge and hit 3 times before but now you have to do it 5 or 6 times before an enemy is defeated.
The difficulty presented here is one of attrition/fatigue. Basically it banks on the player just making mistakes to make the game harder. But if you imagine a perfect machine going through such difficulty levels, then really all they've done is make the game take longer.

Corrrect. Give this aanon a cookie.

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Here user, try this simplified answer for a special snowflake with special needs like yourself.

→

Well why don't you come up with some justifications for the examples that were presented in the thread? Maybe provide some counter examples that use similar mechanics that would be considered fair given context and execution? Of course, you could always avoid the urge to shitpost in lieu of contributing to the thread.

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Tom Clancy's The Division

Artificial difficulty is challenge that is not derived from the established context.

Alternatively it is simply fudging the numbers. The scenario is only 'difficult' because the numbers involved simply fall apart.

People deserve what they got for attacking a non-hostile DRAGON who gives you a key item without any animosity towards you whatsoever.

I think "artificial difficulty" is poorly defined. But cheap deaths or cheating AI are both shitty bandaids for bad design.

Examples: dragon's lair, rubberbanding AI, AI that doesn't follow same rules as players in order to make up for its shitty decision making (old RPS was bad about this), etc.

The issue I have with "artifical difficulty" is plebs try to apply it to balls-hard (but still fair) games because they simply can't git gud.

Most of the anons in this thread are right. It's the difference between I Wanna Be The Guy and Super Meat Boy.

I wanna be the guy kills you with bullshit out of nowhere with no warning or reason. Super Meat Boy establishes rules and doesn't change them in an extremely difficult but doable environment.

He probably thinks we'll apply the term to things like Dark Souls which is what really really shitty players of the game actually do. The reason being is that they are looking at Dark Souls like the novice at poker. In a piece meal sort of way. They got in a tight spot from their own fuckups and died.

In Dark Souls there are no enemy attacks that aren't telegraphed in some way. Nothing is just suddenly happening. Every enemy has a wind up animation just before they hit. This gives you options to block, parry, or dodge. With sufficient stamina and stats, everything can possibly be blocked. Not everything can be parried but they don't give you any indication of that and in fact they seem to point towards only human-like enemies have attacks that can be parried.
Everything can be dodged.

There are never any enemies that just come out of nowhere unless you're not paying attention to your surroundings. Yes, there are enemies that might be hiding around a corner, but if you take your time, they shouldn't suddenly surprise you with an instant kill. They usually jump out just before you would round the corner (at normal jogging speed, not sprinting) or jump out just after you passed it, usually making a sound to indicate that you should turn around and face them. If you're dumb enough to not notice them, then its your fault for getting hit on their little surprise.

Yes, there is a leveling up component to Dark Souls games but if we can link it back to poker, the level up system is basically a replacement for skill. If you're having trouble, you can always float yourself above your troubles by manipulating the numbers in your favor. In poker, this would be like you being bad at bluffing or knowing when to fold so you rely on being dealt good cards to win with even if you fuck up the other aspects.
That being said, like in poker you don't really need a good hand to win and in Dark Souls you could complete the game without taking a single level up and this is evidenced by the fact that some people have done it already.

You think those are good descriptions?

Pretty much anything with RNG to it, so the entire RPG genre which heavily utilizes the RNG for it's mechanics.

Trial and error is built in around the expectation that you fail from the beginning and learn to try something else until you succeed. The RNG part is obnoxious is is basically designed to squeeze as many gameplay hours as possible out of youwith you but figuring out the blocks without a guide or hint through trial and error is not artificial difficulty.

More RNG, with the added insult that you can't game the odds through statistical probability and double dealing with other players. It's like you never played these board games.

Everyone agrees on that underlying point you dumb fuck. Even I do if you bother to check IDs (it's my first post too) however, what is and is not considered to be involving skill vs not involving skill is where the word itself falls apart.

could you say that defining artificial difficulty is artificially difficult?

Holy shit why are people writing walls of text instead of calling each other faggots

Artificial difficulty = not based on player skill.

The most prominent example is RNG, but a death that is completely unpredictable and can only be avoided by dying and then reloading and thus having foreknowledge is also a good example of artificial difficulty.

It isn't challenging, it just adds tedium.

It's only a wall if you don't have the mental capabilities to step over it. Also, because short comments tend to be dismissed out of hand, regardless of how true they may be, so a small thesis is required.

How?

Hey.

Stop double spacing your posts.

You fucking faggot.

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Whelp lets start with this guy right here he considers Level Scaling to not be artificial difficulty but is instead just lazy design as seen here On the other hand and consider number adjustments to be artificially difficult since it's not changing anything else but fudging the numbers which Level Scaling does as a rule. Then there is everyone whom thinks Trial and Error is artificial difficulty Me and some others includes the AI rubber banding and maybe other cheap tricks to compensate lack of intelligence Everyone uses RNG as an example as well, although I think they mean pure RNG instead of predictably random mechanics but then again some faggots can hate RNG so much anything to do with it can turn them right off.

That's just this thread. Everything I've listed here exists in part or in full in several games and is integral to certain genres in how they function. The fact several hate Trial and Error and consider it artificial difficulty even though bad implementation is just shit design choice instead of any "fakeness" to it since memorization is a skill.

The problem is people use artificial difficulty to describe bad game design, and not as a design element itself.
now check my digits

Sounds fair enough

when a game has a 1 in 1000 chance to kill you instantly with no means of prevention every second, it has artificial difficulty

also

There is no such a thing. If there is a way to win and you can't do it, it's your problem. There is a braindead user calling Natural Doctrine an artificial difficulty because there is no million casualized way to finish a stage.

Did you even read past the post using the example of Monopoly?

And more here. In the end, "artificial difficulty" _IS_ lazy design. But I prefer to make a distinct separation between fudging numbers vs outright bullshit.
Fudged numbers as "difficulty", like I stated before, is really apparent if you were to imagine a perfect machine going through the game on different difficulty settings and realizing that if it never made any mistakes it would only be taking the machine longer to complete the game under increased "difficulty".

And yeah you're right, these things exist in part or in full in many many games, even arguably good/well designed games but that doesn't make them any more bullshit when they're encountered.
Yes, many games use something like an RNG as part of the mechanic but the difference between a well designed game using an RNG and a poorly designed game is that in a well designed game you should be able to game the RNG itself or at least not have to fully rely on it as a prime factor in your strategy.

Consider an RPG game where you can take measures to increase your chance of doing critical hits, blocking/dodging, etc etc. All things made to help you in the face of the RNG and make you slightly more powerful in regards to it but not overly so as those increased chances won't ever become part of your strategy, they're just icing on the cake. And yes, there may be times where the RNG is not in your favor but there should be, in good design, some way to mitigate the CHANCE of that happening.
A bad game would make the RNG unable to be gamed by you and in fact would make the outcomes so random that you couldn't reliably plan a strategy for your moves. You can't ever tell if the next enemy attack is going to instantly kill you or do zero damage or normal damage because they all have equal chances. That is bad design.

Basically, its the difference between being able to plan your next moves because you can count, most times, on the 20-sided die hitting something between 1 or 20 vs you not being able to do anything that isn't pure luck because only 1 or 20 matter.

And as for my previous statements where I agree that many games have all these artificially difficult elements in them its pretty much likened to this example:

You can make lots of money but have a job that you absolutely hate and find no enjoyment in. So while you might be getting something good, the good is tainted and often outweighed by the shit you have to stomp through to get to it. The happiness the loadsamoney brings is brief and at some points not even really worth it.
Or, you can make very little money but have a job that you truly enjoy and find wonderful. Sure, you have that little nag of not having disposable income to do with as you like but your job is fulfilling and you're all around happy. What little you can do with your money in this situation is actually probably bringing more happiness because you're not stomping through waist-high shit to get it.

You know, these concepts really shouldn't be difficult for someone to grasp who doesn't have any real mental/social disorder or at least has some modicum of life experience or at least game-playing experience that spans multiple genres and years.

Artificial difficulty basically boils down to not telling or preparing the player for what follows in any way and then punishing them for failing to be prepared. But there's lots of supposed subsets.

Enemy that cannot be seen by any means that attacks you through the floor and ignores your defensive measures, with only walking forwards then back being able to lure it out.

When in a tight space the camera moves into a position so that you cannot see the enemy/their attacks, allowing you to be hit more easily

etc

I can't remember what this pic says, but pic related.

This is something you'd like to see more of, then? Trial and error is needless padding that doesn't pose a challenge of reflex, timing or even cognitive strain, but instead requires a great deal of time put into observation and ruling out possibility. Sure, I guess that prolonged observation and pattern recognition could be considered skills that must be developed in order to overcome the challenge, I just don't think it works well.

Your objective as the player, aside from completing objectives related to the story, is to avoid damage while defeating foes in order to progress. In other words, self preservation. This particular puzzle in Onimusha is directly in opposition to that goal in such a way that it is very likely that you will fail at least once before you learn how to approach it. Aside from that, the process of repeating the entire room along with unskippable cutscenes is tedious and they could have at least given the player the ability to skip dialogue.

Maybe it's true that the term "Artificial difficulty" is poorly defined. Maybe there should be than one term to describe a number of poorly implemented scenarios.

Its basically when something gives off a pretense of being difficult without actually being difficult.

Like bosses which have easy to learn and extremely predictable patterns which afford players a lot of time to avoid but have fuckton of health and do a lot of damage to players for example.

Bosses like that can be "hard" but only because of how much of a chore it is to repeatedly to do the exact same thing tens or hundreds of time without fucking up and trying to do something reckless to end the fight more quickly because you are fucking bored.

People just like to use buzzwords that they like to think is the magic word to win any argument in one word so they don't have to exert any evidence into it.

I think I recall some one saying the Camera in Star Fox Zero was artificial difficulty. Controversial to some, but I thought a big aspect of playing games is the ability to actually adapt to them. I have a hard time taking anyone argument seriously if they can't even adapt to a games playstyle.

Here we go again
Artificial, meaning something that is created and not made naturally, holding conotations of being incomplete or a superficial mock up, in the context of dificulty, which is the complexity of a video game or part of one in which the player is required to know how to use the game's systems to progress, is the mock up of dificulty, such that there is no prior knowledge or information to prepare the player for the challenge, like a pop quiz on information from a chapter you couldn't have known to study; you are put in a situation in which the first attempt will result in failure. While failure is good to learn from, often it is used more just to make the player lose progress for the reason of the dev wanting it that way. Let's say you have a character that plays pure magic, and way later in the game, you fight a boss that completely resists magic; you couldn't have known, so failure is inevitable.
When you give the player freedom of choice, you need to account for that, or your game will have artificially difficult points without real fault. This can sometimes lead to a homogenized experience if you don't know how to account for all the customization well enough, but at least if you try you won't get stuff where a player decided to go close range physical only and you have a boss or just an enemy type that you can only fight ranged.

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Thats not artificial difficulty at all.

They is no difficulty in the fact the boss is Magic Resistant, thats is just somthing you do no expect in your first run.

Some of you people seriously sound like you want every surprise spelt out to you. Isn't that essentially hand holding?

I wanna be the guy/boshy

I think stats/skill trees in games are a true definition of artifical difficultly. The defeat of some enemies are completely determined by a stat rather than skill. This means that no matter how good your tactics are, to beat certain enemies you have to grind and level up. If you removed stats from these games you would see how truly shallow many of them are.

After playing through this game, I often found myself dying not due to poor performance, but rather the game's special effects (that I could find no way to turn off on PC) obscuring what I wanted to see, which was incoming enemy attacks. A lot of recent games have this problem, which is an unfortunate side effect of games getting prettier and the devs overdoing the effects. Also in the case of the chase scenes, the second escape sequence in particular took me a while to figure out that I wasn't dying from an enemy's projectiles, but rather the scenery had suddenly become lethal and was one-shotting me.

that's not "artificial" since it's intuitive and makes sense based on how the game works. You become more powerful by gaining levels.

Artificial difficulty would be something completely unintuitive and not defined by the gameplay. Like a game where falling in holes normally kills you and then, out of nowhere, the only way to progress is to voluntarily jump into a hole. But there are no indicators or hints that this is a unique hole.

Well, it's kind of like defining time. Everyone knows what it is but it's very hard to put your finger on its nature when you try to put it in words.

I challenge anyone ITT to define what time is in their own words. No cheating so you can't go to dictionary.com; lay it on me!

Are you saying that managing character attributes is not a skill in and of itself?

A metric used to measure the order in which events occur.

That's artificial longevity, not artificial difficulty.

It's artificially difficult if you had no idea magic resistance was even a thing up to this point and you have effectively no means to deal with it, like having hit max level and specced everything into magic already. The whole point of giving the player options is that they should all be viable. Some more viable than others at certain points, yes, but not explicitly better or worse.

That's just putting a big middle finger up for anyone who wanted to play the game their way instead of on their terms.

There are some points I agree with here, like about AI breaking the rules when they're meant to be equal status to the player.

But the forethought argument is silly. If you were given a walkthrough of a challenge prior to trying it, would it be that much different? The only difference is that you wouldn't be learning it incremently at least the mechanics if RNG-based.

Don't you like surprises?

Right
Hence
Notreal difficulty
It would be difficult if it had phases where it changed resistance that you could draw out, say by doing a weak physical so he switches to physical defense, like magus from chrono trigger
Making fun of you aside, there's some difference between a surprise and something that fucks over hours of playtime to beat for something that has nothing to do with skill.

Not that, I'm talking in relation to late game enemies. It's an illusion of getting more skillful rather than actual skill. The more you level up, the easier the game becomes. Take away that from any game that uses it and see how many of those games become shallow.

I always thought of artificial difficulty as something that tests your endurance rather than your skill. Like an easy enemy given more health, it doesn't make it harder to beat, just makes it take longer.

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That's a good example of artifical difficulty.

Don't forget that, assuming CoH2 didn't depart from CoH1's difficulties, they get additional soft stats, meaning their units are also superior on a qualitative basis in addition to their having more of them without reason.

the funniest part about this is darksouls does this but most of Holla Forums will agree with this

Called it

Making the game harder by tweaking numbers and adding cheap bullshit

I agree

I cant think of any Dark souls enemy apart from the stupid dragon in 2 which has an obnoxious amount of health, everything dies in 3 - 5 hits except bosses and one-off enemies

This, buffing an enemy with health and attack power to make it difficult.

If the game has an element that a player that has played each game in the series, or played for the first time that puts the player in a failure state before a player can react.

Alternatively, stacking numbers or depleting resources and sending to a checkpoint leaving them worse off then when they died.

Literally game design 101.

Sure the game wanted you to be autisticly precise at times but it wasnt that bad

Everything in game design basically comes back to tweaking numbers on some level.

i think a good example would be rubber banding ai. trial and error is just trial and error i dont see how that counts

It's an excuse casuals come up with.

You're full of shit.

I've not played it myself but the user seemed on point with his other statements.

Dark Souls apologists sure are funny.

There we go.
Why are you even here? Go back to candy crash, girls.

It was bait all along. I am so surprised by this revelation.

No?
Snakes can trigger the traps perfectly fine.
Camera has auto adjust option to turn off.
And being hit by something that isn't there sure sounds legit.

Snakes have never once set off any of the pressure plates in Sen's Fortress and you're the first person ever to argue that they can, which seems mighty suspicious.

git gud. only retards get hit by obvious shockwaves

Dude the very first two snakes can be baited out to the plate and get hit by the bolts.
Holy shit, are you for real?

I have had to set off the pressure plate every time or they walk over it without setting it off. What fucking version have you been playing?

/thread

A lot of people use the term wrong but it's supposed to apply to things largely outside the player's control that cannot be accounted for.

Some people have said Monster Hunter not allowing you to change attack direction mid-combo is artifical difficulty, but it's really not: the player is quickly made aware and can adjust their play to deal with the problem.

Company of Heroes 2 on the other hand has the AIs firing mortars, grenades, etc into your squads in the fog of war. Often they can outrange your snipers and still do this. That is fucking bullshit.

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Snakes can totally set off traps in Sen's Fortress bro, I don't know what you're talking about.

Wrong, your goal is to win the game. Dieing is merely a losing state and trying again is merely resetting the game to try again from wherever it was you will restart from. The story is merely set dressing to give some context for additional enjoyment, the game comes first because that is what it is at it's core. The "objective" that you list is shallow and only applies to a specific set of games that involves purely action, and is exactly the wrong mindest to be in while playing vidya because it poisons your view of failure and puts an extreme limit on what you can enjoy. Surviving to the end without failure is a sign of your skill, how good you can beat the game and win. Instead of survival being a goal it is a measurement, which is why beating the hardest games on your first go used to be a sign that you were good.

Putting aside that how people throw dice and Law of Averages can lead to probable outcomes since I have a gut feeling you won't budge on that, if you bothered to read the rules of Monopoly you'd know that unowned properties that you don't buy when you land on them goes up for auction. If your not going to use Monopoly as it's written in the rules instead of whatever House Ruled variant you played then don't bother, people don't read the rules and just plays a heavily House Ruled variant so the experience between people can vary wildly.

In my experience it's the opposite, newer players hate older mechanics that they consider bad game design in general regardless of implementation while older players like those mechanics because they grew up on them.

Although we generally agree on some things, I cannot agree with you about "artificial difficulty" since it's pretty much just another word for bad game design. There doesn't even need to be a new word for that, since from your point of view it's terrible implementation of RNG which is a very specific issue but simply stating the game is bad because it is based entirely on luck will get the message across just as well if not better then calling something artificially difficult since luck makes it clear what you're talking about while artificial difficulty is soft language that is possibly broad and nobody agrees on what it can mean beyond the obvious (game makes skill irrelevant).

But I did explicitly state that.
So you clearly didn't read my post. You just skimmed over it.
Basically, fuck you.

There's no friggin way they can. Never once has that one snaketits after the guillotine set off the plate behind her when forced onto it
And that narrow corridor where the plate shoots from behind? The snake walks through there every time without setting it off.

Even if this is some cosmic coincidence and I've just never had the luck of snakes setting off the traps, it still ignores the other stupid shit in the games.

I'm probably gonna catch some flak for this but anyway, I was actually playing dark souls today and I went through the new londo ruins with the ghosts. That place is without a doubt artificially hard. Let me explain why. First off if you go there you are most likely cursed, as I was. If you aren't you need to use the transient curse to be able to attack the ghosts. This means that before anything you either need to be cursed and have half health or use an item that is difficult to come by until you are already fighting the ghosts. But that isn't necessarily why I think it classifies as artificial difficulty. I think it does because of the ghosts. The ghosts can move through walls, fly, have ridiculous attack range, and tank you at every opportunity. This means the devs made it hard by simply putting ghosts in places you wouldn't know they are until they have already killed you. There are ghosts that hide under the floor or come out behind you after a delay of even come through walls while you are on a ladder. This is artificially difficult. No amount of stats, grinding, or most importantly skill can protect you from the cheap deaths the ghosts hand out contstantly. I think that is what artificial difficulty is, when you make an area a slog to get through by inflating numbers or cat Mario tier enemy placement. Even things like mimics aren't artificially difficult as you can check for them by test swinging or looking for breathing but the ghosts come out of nowhere in large numbers that you either need an item or to have half health to even begin interacting with them. That is artificially difficult.

The game sets the rules.
The AI then breaks those rules.

I suspect Hearts of Iron III doing this.

Also another good example of this is found in racing games with rubber band AI

...

To be honest, you can run through the area without combating a single ghost, up to the part with the ladders that lead to [guy in the red robe] can't remember the name.

But yeah, that area was tough as shit if you went in fully cleaning the path. Still like it in retrospect.

As far as DS1 goes, I'd say the only artificial difficulty was the two white knight archers in Anor Londo.

The objective that I list is a description of the functioning of the specific game in question that I posed for example. In the game, your character has a health bar. Your health bar depletes when you receive blows from environmental hazards or when enemies attack you. If you think the objective that I listed is "shallow" - and who knows what you mean by this - then that's the game's fault. How do you beat the game? Oh, that, right; you diminish the amount of damage that you acquire from enemies and environmental hazards so that you can retain enough health points to move through the entirety of each sequence that makes up the game's levels and reach the final objective. How exactly do you "survive to the end without failure" in a game that features randomized tiles that function in a specific way that is never explained and that expects you to learn about these tiles via trial and error? What do you mean by "poisons your view of failure"? That doesn't make any sense because your "view of failure" is always dictated by the game's rules. If you're playing a primarily action oriented game like Onimusha, then failure is what I described above. The game features puzzles that change the definition of failure, but even within that context, some things can be considered unreasonable.

The thing is, I tried to run through a few times but I would either have ghosts body block me, still reach me with their stupidly far reaching attack or like I said before I would get on the ladder and be attacked while completely helpless

I always see GRID 1's Ravenwest as one of the biggest examples of artificial difficulty.
They drive faster than you can, they have cars that cannot be moved, they hit every corner absolutely perfect no matter what damage you do to them, they also cannot be run off the road or damaged too much to be able to continue.
Yet all of that does not apply to you or any other racing team in the entire game. You can be run off the road as if you were made of paper, you can hit another racer in to a wall hard enough to take them completely out of the race, no other racer can go faster than you can in the same car, and if you decide to use them as a buffer to get around a corner, they will go flying off of their racing line and fuck up.

Artificial difficulty, to me, is when the AI is cheating in order to be harder.

And yet, I still more or less correctly identified what you considered to be artificial difficulty.

Love you too, user-kun~

Rereading your post after reading this I realized I misread the context of your previous post from it's formatting. I thought you moved on from Onimusha and was talking about games in general and only referred to Onimusha in an offhand manner. So I think we should just agree to disagree because now we're on entirely separate pages.

My fault on that one.

Reminds me of GTAV cops who always know where you are at all times. You lose the cops, and hide on foot, but the cops will stop in your general location, walk out of their cars, and start walking towards your general direction. If you had never gotten out of your car, neither would the cops get out of theirs. Psychic police know whether you left your car and where you are hiding, even though they have had no sight of you.

I had the same problem with the escape scenes, so much shit going on that it was hard to figure out which spot had suddenly turned unsafe, especially with the water temple.

No you didn't.

I made monopoly as a prime example of artificial difficulty plaguing a game.
I made sudoku as an example of a game with no artificial difficulty.
I made poker as an example of a game that casuals see as artificially difficult but in fact is not.

You're dumb.

Boils down to the RNG in all three of those examples. Monopoly having the heaviest elements, Sudoku having none, and Poker having more predictable outcomes that is dependant on the skill of the guys keeping track of the cards vs how good whoever is shuffling the deck is.

*Sudoku having little to none,

Uhm…no.

Yes.

Rereading it again, and still yes. You repeating otherwise isn't going to change this.

For a skilled player, poker doesn't depend on the deck.

What the fuck you nigger do you even play poker, skilled players minimize luck but the element is not entirely gone.

you know, i wouldnt be surprised if someone exists who legitimately thinks that because he is incapable of multitasking that the game becomes artificially difficult.

oh wait, i know he exists, because his name is jim sterling.

that fat faggot already said he doesnt like starfox, he complained that it was a "mediocre" rail shooter, but then gave the game a 20/100 (slaughtering the metacritic average) because "it wasnt like the older ones"
If you then listen to his insane ramblings about the game, he claims that the camera control makes things too difficult, and acts like the game was being developed as a straight up clone of SF64 before miyamoto came in and fucked it up by telling them to make the game control different.

Im really starting to believe that SF0 should replace driving exams, and if you cant finish the game you arent allowed to get into a multiton 70mph bomb that requires you to be slightly more vigilant than the average cow to operate safely.
Sure as fuck would clear out the roadways and we could stop having wrecks all together.

I hope nintendo patches in analog control, but just to fuck with everyone, they make it so the game still uses two screens, just the gamepad screen is moved by the analog stick. It would prove once and for all for a solid fucking fact that people arent complaining about motion controls, they are complaining because they are physically too inept to keep track of more than one screen at a time.

good examples

I Wanna Be the Guy

Difficulty that has the game straight up cheat and or putting forward something in the game that has nothing to do with the skills you've developed and have it be harder then the rest of the game.

Yu gi oh forbidden memories
The game gets a fresh hand each turn allowing it which when it has a monster that can be fused played on the field, the fusion material will always be in it's hand next turn.

Some fighting games on the hardest difficulty read your input and react accordingly and when not attacking have a pre set block string amount before an attack gets in, though here knowing that you can mash during attacks to throw them off.

Resident Evil 4 a 3rd person shooter where you're suddenly expected when playing as Ashley made to one of those slide puzzles which while being as simple as moving in a circle it's a entire different play style and you can easily mess yourself up here.

DBZ budokai 3 special edition (regular doesn't do this)
On Z3 the true final boss is level 140 (level cap is 99) having maxed out all stats in a fight that you're pretty much expected to end in 15 seconds or you lose because after you're in a unrecoverable handicapped position due to the battle conditions even on the previous difficulty where he's only level 60.
This version is also in the challenge mode as the final fight in special edition but there you can have your Choice of the character who fights him and the condition is gone.

SMT DDS 2 this game has multiple moments where your party is split or members are removed, getting skills in this game is expensive and levels is time, the game expected the player to actually have on multiple occasions to have made sure the party was fully balanced when that pretty much doubles the time needed to prep for anything, the closest the previous game did to this was 1 instance where the party splits but there it fills the area with weak but money and exp rich mooks for the early part of the section which 2 didn't do but tosses the hardest demons and boss fights up to that point in the game right after the splits.
So you go from a team of up kept lv26 team to 1 lv26 and 2 lv 16 with 0 skills payed for in them and the strength of the demons where you are now stuck scales up, I had to 2 times reload an older save to prep for sections I'd have no idea would have appeared and without those saves it might as well been a dead game.

Jojo Golden Wind
3 fights in the game change the rules of the game.
1 suddenly turns into a climb up a residential area where once you fail once you might as well reset the game.
A boss fight where the hitbox on the boss is awkward to hit while they dive bomb and stun lock you no problem
A section where you're shooting someone from the back of a car but the bullets just work or don't, sometimes mashing here leaves you with a perfect score or you lose within the first 15 seconds.

Omega in Megaman ZX
His AI is random, some fights he can be a fun challenge, others he can spam the attack with more I frames then the move itself that heals a 6th of his health over and over again right at the end.
And to actually get the reward for this boss fight you need to do the teleporting spike trap in reverse which needs leaps of faith so good luck first try.

These examples(bar the ladder one) are all examples of neccesary artificial difficulty though, maybe not the rubberbanding in racing. Fighting game AI has to cheat to make the game even remotely competitive, and card game AI does it for the same reason.

lmao

Higher difficulties levels with enemy AI unchanged but they have 10 times more health and damage resistances. *koff* DIABLO *kof*

A better name would be "lazy difficulty" since everything in a game is an artificial construct. Videogames don't occur in nature, folks, and being natural isn't automatically a good thing.

Artificial difficulty is probably the most retarded videogame term I've heard.

Zelda2 had a reason for that shit, and it didn't matter because the fights lasted as long as you wanted. Dark souls had the space for a cat thing no one even fights, they could have done a bit more than armor changes all over. And then NG+ is just damage sponge central.