Hardcore
Difficulty is a thing you need in
video games. If there isn’t a possibility of failure, where’s the fun? And if
things don’t get harder the further you go, won’t the game become boring?
Because of this, there’s a sweet spot
game developers have to find when balancing their single-player games. Make it
too easy and fans are unhappy because the game becomes a cakewalk. Make it too
hard and fans are unhappy because they can’t progress. While multiple
difficulty settings allow players to select their level of choice, even then
developers must ensure that even the most punishing of difficulty levels are
still fair enough that skilled players can master and overcome any challenge
thrown at them.
Enter Cuphead. Developed by industry newcomer StudioMDHR Entertainment,
the 1930s-era cartoon inspired game quickly gained notoriety among the gaming
community for being one of the hardest games released in 2017. Take my word for
it, the game’s no joke.
And not unlike fellow games both
popular and notoriously unforgiving such as the Souls franchise, Cuphead has
earned itself a rather annoying small group of fans who are quick to make fun
of players who complain about the high difficulty of the game, rallying
together with the mighty war cry of “git gud”.
That got me thinking: are ultra-hard
games with no way to lighten the difficulty really a good idea? As much as I’ve
been enjoying Cuphead I have to admit
it does get a bit frustrating being continually chewed up and spat back out by
the same boss over and over again potentially for hours at a time. What makes
these games so appealing?
I think part of the enjoyment people
get out of games like Cuphead or Dark Souls is the grind to progressing
in the game. Your first time fighting a new boss in either of those has a high
probability of ending in death for you, no questions asked. It ends up being a
matter of trial or error, as you slowly learn the boss’s moveset, patterns and the
optimal way to keep yourself alive while at the same time dealing enough damage
to finish them off. I’ll admit that finally beating a tough boss in Cuphead is one of the best feelings I’ve
had in gaming for a long time…only for
it to immediately be crushed when the next boss kicks me straight into next
week just moments later.
I don’t really get the “every game
needs to be crushingly difficult otherwise it’s only for noobs and casual
gamers” mindset. While I do get the satisfaction of getting past a hard part in
a game, I do kind of start to feel down on the entire experience when I realize
that the next part is going to be equally tough if not worse. If I can’t win
the game, what’s the point in playing the game?
I guess there’s people out there who only
play games like that to “prove their skill”, but there’s a word for those
people. I wanna keep this blog semi-family friendly so I won’t say it here, but
I’m sure you know what it is.
There’s always the classic argument of
“B-b-but Contra and Mega Man and all the other NES games
were super hard and they’re classics! Why can’t all games be like that? THE
CASUALS HAVE GONE SOFT!”
But most people who argue this forget
that there’s a reason why NES games and others from around that time were punishingly
hard. Because cartridges and CDs from back in the 80’s didn’t have much room
for data, games couldn’t have more than a few hours’ worth of content. The game
industry’s solution? Make everything super hard! That way people could get
stuck on a level for days on end, therefore extending the time the game would
be played.
One of the more infamous examples is
the “I Just Can’t Wait to be King” level from The Lion King on SNES. Despite being the second level of the game,
it was deliberately designed to be extra-challenging by Disney Interactive
because they didn’t want kids to be able to beat the game within a single
one-week rental period. You can’t look at something like that and tell me
“Yeah, that sounds fair.”
We’re currently in the middle of a
golden age of video game development, and I have no doubt even super-hard games
like Cuphead will be looked back on
fondly years later. But I still find it hard to believe that a game designed so
hard that you need to become a champion at every single level can be a classic
with a wide audience. Like it or not, accessibility is everything when it comes
to sales. If you wind up not enjoying a game, you can refund or trade-in or
sell it online, and the developer ends up losing money. And as we’ve learned
over the past few months, that’s really all they’re after these days.
Song of the Week
Botanic Panic - Cuphead
No comments:
Post a Comment