Hard Mode for Dummies

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Hard Mode for Dummies.

By: Mitchell Brown

     Remember when you first discovered Arizona Iced Tea? It's cheap, delicious, and more for your money. Isn't it nice when products are cost efficient? If they where not nobody would buy them and they would go the way of Crystal Pepsi or Tab; you’d never see them again. In the gaming industry, however, this is not the case, as most of us (the consumer) will purchase games regardless of their quality. This opens avenues to the production of fast cheap games.
      We no longer complain about games being easy. We have become accustomed to it. As a matter of fact, most games that offer a difficulty setting do not offer the hardest setting until after you have already beaten the game. What a brilliant marketing scheme it is to gather play time and replay value out of a lightly padded game. They have become remarkably easier to complete. Even major franchises such as Final Fantasy, which has had been notoriously hard in the past, has gone into this trend. Simple things, such as Save Points, as seen in Final Fantasy, now heal your HP and MP fully upon touching them, contrasted with the hours between save points in some older games in the franchise. Many of these games are a breeze to complete, yet still boast instances of incredibly hard optional bosses that the casual gamer may never choose to encounter.
Sacred 2: Fallen Angel is a “hack and slash” loot-heavy game. Very fun, and with such a simple game play, its difficulty should be high to compensate for this fact. It tries to deliver, but fails. It is lacking in its variety of classes, unique as they may be. With no Healing class, the game relies on your pressing left on the D-pad for 60% of your health to be restored via the use of a potion. There are no meticulous builds used to defeat difficult bosses, or even to clear the game without a death. You simply hit a button for near full health. The game initially offers Bronze and Silver difficulties, and as you beat the game you can unlock Gold, Platinum, and even Nionium. Between these difficulties, no change in strategy is required. You simply hit left to heal.
     Hard mode. The difficulty for the Elite Gamer. Nobody but your friend who plays until 3 in the morning can beat it, right? This is not the case anymore. New names have been invented for the different settings, to inspire the imagination of the gamer. Names such as “Hardcore”, “Elite”, “Veteran”, “All Star”, and “Epic”, among many others including the fabled God mode have replaced Easy – Medium – Hard. These settings quite often do not make the game appreciably harder in many cases. Rather than making you die easier, the enemy is simply made harder to kill, while it inexplicably takes more damage; moves are made unblockable or near unavoidable without the proper preemptive roll. The focus isn’t on AI development to become smarter and act faster, it is on making us react faster and think more. We need to demand what we want, not accept poorly made games. Playing an FPS with perfect aim on the hardest setting, sitting behind significant cover, enemies flat out live through a well aimed speedy head shot. The player has taken the shot and run to the next cover position thinking the enemy to be dead. On the way there, being gunned down full sprint occurs regularly by the enemy that has survived. Running into a seemingly endless supply of enemy hoard is not a problem if they are reasonably killable.
      What is scarier than seeing multiple zombies coming towards you? The same scenario without ammo. Ammunition limitations are a legitimate method to increase a game’s difficulty, to make it scary and full of intense survival situations. What about when you first were cruising around in a submarine and saw a giant green monster? As a powerful mercenary from an elite fighting force called SOLDIER you were ready to destroy it. When the fight started and it hit you for over 50% of your HP, you were concerned, but figured you could manage through it. Then it does max damage to all your characters at once and you get a game over. You’re pumped, but ready to take on the challenge again after further preparation. Leveling to fight optional bosses can be fun and rewarding, particularly for the hardcore. The adrenaline rush of killing something powerful enough to wipe out a full military force makes it worth it. We still have friends who did not beat it. Those of us that managed to do so feel ourselves a part of an elite group of gamers.
     We remember and love games that make us try as hard as we can to beat them, if not simply for bragging rights within our own small group of friends. Now it seems like you have to make the games hard for yourself. Eliminating the use of the Ray Gun, the bazooka, the M203 round or limiting the number of saves, the number of party members, equipment, party member levels, used in fights, and even at times the use of the non-dominant hand. The over abundance of noob tubes in games seems to be overwhelming. They used to be slow, low damage splash and the slowest reloading time you have ever saw. Now we seem to be getting far more powerful versions. Although innovative and fun for a time, things like Resistance's Laark are just too overpowered. The ability to shoot a missile into a room, stop it, unleash a hoard of smaller missiles from it killing enemies in the room, then continue the flight path into the next room killing even more enemies is ludicrous. On top of this, is boasts a moderately fast reload for a giant rocket launcher and incredibly fast shooting speed, rivaling that of a sniper rifle, and multiple ammo drops. The Laark is a powerful tool in any game, making the game fun, but the fun does not last for the hardcore player, with the game’s difficulty disappearing down the toilet.
     The most prominent feature in games now is the ability to save. As memory becomes vanilla, the old methods of "saving" through the use of passwords have been replaced with save files. A big boss battle is coming up? No problem. Just save at the handily placed sphere or statue that the developers have input before difficult battles, giving us the ability to try over and over again without fear of failure. Games like Contra, difficult for many reasons including: lack of controls, limited availability of bonus lives coupled with a game over without a save. Starting over after reaching level 7 was no small thing. With the ability to save, you can start where you left off, without the down side of pass words where you lose all extra lives or any bonuses previously acquired. Games today, designed with content for over 100 hours of solid game-play require the save feature, despite the reduction in difficulty that it offers. Difficulty must come from other sources. In Metal Gear Solid, difficulty is added through the limitation of radar functions. 
     We, as consumers, need to demand that games be made correctly. If a game is designed to be too hard, many consumers demand easy modes, extra lives, ammunition, lower level enemies, decreased enemy AI, or the inclusion of better equipment. As you play, you will ideally improve, thereby wanting harder games to play. But you will find a lack of them if we don't change the market. Rather than wanting new games all the time, we should be seeking new game styles, new engines, and new characters to love, not Copy and Paste games of the versions we loved. We need to demand better and harder games, otherwise our kill to deaths will never change. As things stand, our complaining about being owned will continue, and our frustration for losing to an enemy AI, even after making a perfect shot, will continue.

Increase quality. Not Health.