Shallow Depths

"Do not be concerned, life is hardly as precious as one might think" - Yurt, the Silent Chief, Demon's Souls

[Post includes spoilers for the early part of the game]

Returning to Demon's Souls after a long hiatus feels like falling back into the arms of an intense lover. Part of me regrets ever leaving, but it's hard to maintain so much passion and focus. From the outside this affair might seem unhealthy, but it's a willing submission to a fair master who always encourages the best from me.

In the past I've written about the difficulty in Demon's Souls being far less than many have suggested. I still feel that way, but it was also a knee-jerk reaction to difficulty dominating the conversation. My lover is not cruel. The first word I'd choose to describe Demon's Souls isn't brutal, punishing, or (gods forbid) hardcore. I'd call it 'coherent' – every element serves the overall dark fantasy vision.

Challenge is an important part of that creation, true, but it's easily over-emphasised. Still, my claim that Demon's Souls isn't ridiculously hard is about as inadequate as throwing around exaggeration from the other side ("The hardest RPG ever made, with some of the most unforgiving rules ever to be enforced on a player", honestly?).

Besides, I'm not trying to be elitist, I just want to see more sophisticated discussion of game challenges in general. If Demon's Souls is so difficult, I want to understand the nature of its challenge. Especially given personally I find, say, God of War harder. Not the most rational assessment, maybe, but not wholly without reason either. God of War has a faster pace, more complex combos, and if I get stuck I can't just try out another level instead.

Difficulty in Demon's Souls is usually described in mechanical terms. Combat is precise, and occurs in a more considered way than your average hack-and-slash. Rushing in or making small mistakes can cost you a lot. The relatively harsh penalty for death means constantly weighing up the risk of continuing, and potentially losing the chance to spend your collected souls.

However, the difficulty in Demon's Souls is, first and foremost, not about reflexes and control-mastery. It isn't even about gathering knowledge and using smarter strategies (although that helps immensely). No, in my opinion the primary reason Demon's Souls is difficult is because it challenges optimism.

Dark fantasy is usually a matter of aesthetic and thematic style, like the blood splatters and intrigues of Dragon Age. But here darkness permeates the experience more deeply, and wants you to feel despair.

The Demon's Souls tutorial teaches basic controls, then smacks you fatally with a giant axe. Even this fight can be won, but it isn't designed with your success in mind. Thus, the tutorial teaches you to feel hopeless. This is also the point where you discover soul form, and have your hit points capped at 50%. Objectively, this isn't any different to displaying a short-but-full hit point gauge, as is common when just starting out in action games. But the psychological impact of seeing your hit points reduced by half is huge.

Much of the best survival horror can make you feel powerless, but it's rarely the intention of other action or roleplaying games. We're surrounded by so many power fantasies an alternative can come as a shock.

The first level is arguably the hardest level to face. Certainly not in terms of the layout or enemies themselves, or even the time it takes to find better equipment, but because you've just been smacked in the nose. And because you can't level your character until you've beaten the first boss. This makes the first level the most rogue-like (in the sense of losing character progress with death, although items are still retained). It's an achievable goal, but the set-up is bound to make you feel under-powered.

Beating the first demon Phalanx is a sweet moment of success. It unlocks the ability to level up, and you earn your body back so that hit-point cap disappears. (You also do less damage in body form, which is one of several reasons I often character-suicide after a boss fight, but people are less likely to mention that bit). You're a successful demon hunter now, and continue into the next part of the level with a new sense of achievement.

Success is likely to be short-lived. Clear a room, and continue on towards the castle. This is the point where many of those who haven't been forewarned will die to a red dragon, who torches them unexpectedly from the sky. If not the dragon, it will probably be something else. Your body is unceremoniously snatched away, and you begin the slow process of level mastery all over again. Swiftly taking away a reward as though to punish anyone who became too happy or complacent. Demon's Souls isn't going to let you forget that power has to be earnt.

In an information sense, Demon's Souls is very restrained, both with its story/characters and mechanics. Story is filled in by imagination. Mechanics are learnt through experience, which requires experimentation (and looking up guides, which I consider valid). Lack of information in general can make you feel inexperienced and vulnerable.

The community discussion surrounding Demon's Souls has also increased its infamy, and feeds the perception of challenge. For example, the statement "the game can get harder if you die too much." is technically correct, but gives a misleading impression without more detailed discussion of the world tendency system, especially if playing online. Word tendency is too involved to fully explain here (see the Wiki if needed), but the idea of a game that gets harder every time you die has coloured a lot of ill-informed discussion, even sometimes among those who have played the game.

Perceptions going into Demon's Souls are likely to be harsh.

The not-so-well-kept secret is that Demon's Souls' challenge can be overcome, and success feels all the sweeter for it. But tackling the difficulty curve is always an emotional challenge before anything else. That might not be comfortable thought, but to me it's what makes the difficulty most worth discussing. And perhaps why I'll persist here, while I avoid most games with a challenging reputation.

I'm not a particularly skilled player, so I do like having difficulty options of some form. I have also improved considerably and am working on continuing to get better. The only way I can do that is if game difficulty stays just a little above my current level. Enough to challenge, but not to give up in frustration.

One of my pet annoyances in games is when I die a few times and start getting messages reminding me I can turn down the difficulty level. The game seems to be mocking me. You aren't good enough to be here, why not just switch to easy mode, you loser? The occasional tip I could probably handle, but once I know the option's there I see no need to hammer the point. Unless someone out there in game-developer-land really enjoys teasing people like me, which is valid I suppose.

Adaptive difficulty is more subtle, and increases game accessibility without seeming to poke faces at me in the process. I have a slightly dubious relationship with this method though.  What if the game's just laughing at me behind my back now, instead of telling me to my face?

Theoretically, adaptive difficulty should be a great way to make games accessible to a wide range of people, and give me that level of challenge I'm looking for. In reality, this idea has quite a long way to go.

The major issue for me is actually choice. In a non-tweakable system, adaptive difficulty must naturaly make assumptions about how much of a challenge I'm looking for, and how many failures I will tolerate. I'm a relatively patient and determined person, so those systems will probably pitch their challenge just a little lower than I would like. It can make the wins less satisfying. Discrete difficulty levels are a bit limited, but at least they give me a choice.

My sister recently linked me to Infinite Adaptive Mario. It uses player performance to determine procedural level generation, as opposed to the more superficial tweaking of current mainstream games.  It doesn't solve my particular issues, but I think investigating different approaches to difficulty managment is useful.

I've never really got the hang of controlling platformers using a keyboard, so a PC Mario game is going to cause me some problems. After a few too many deaths the levels do become easy... and also kind of pointless. Thankfully it doesn't resort to that too quickly, and it's useful that how far you progress before dying is important to how far the difficulty is dropped.

All in all it's an interesting idea, and one I'd be interested to see used elsewhere. My major concern about choice still stands, though. I look forward to the day when I can more commonly control how I want difficulty management to behave.

 I recently finished playing Professor Layton and the Curious Village.  Yes, the first Layton game -- I haven't had my DS for very long and have a lot of catching up to do.

I've been thinking about what makes a puzzle satisfying.  Too easy and it's not really worthy of being called a puzzle.  But too hard and I'll soon check a walkthrough rather than fruitlessly bashing my head against it.

Everyone finds different things challenging, though.  For example, my partner has me well and truly beaten on number problems, while I have an easier time with spatial puzzles.  Puzzle difficulty is quite individual.  That said, I've yet to meet someone who didn't consider that map puzzle in Riven too damn hard.  If you have played it you'll probably remember the one I mean.

Another common problem with puzzles is lack of detailed localisation.  I sometimes need to stop thinking like an Australian.  I forget that what I call the first floor of a building is the second floor in the US (and presumably Japan?).  Date formats and holidays also mess me up sometimes.

These cases where my nationality is a detriment to gaming are relatively infrequent in the scheme of things, but it’s something I’ve been quite conscious of recently.  I dread to think how often game puzzles assume things like normal colour vision.  That's not something I'm likely to notice myself.

(Actually, I take back what I said about my nationality only rarely being a problem.  Delayed release dates and over-pricing are a constant disadvantage to gaming in this country.  But that’s another issue, and one that’s been tackled much better elsewhere.)

I'd include age as a factor making appropriate puzzle difficulty harder to set, but honestly I was way better at this stuff when I was younger.  My skills in basic maths and puzzle-logic have atrophied over the years.  Provided you are old/educated enough to understand fractions you'll probably do as well or better than me.

A game like Professor Layton contains a lot of puzzles of course, so I think it gets away with the potential problems with game puzzles relatively well.  Only a couple put me at a disadvantage for being an Aussie, and with that many puzzles at least some were bound to have the right level of challenge.

I suppose the hint system is one approach to making the challenge level appropriate for a broader range of people.  But I found that was usually either no help at all or practically gave away the answer.  Writing good hints must be at least as difficult as coming up with good puzzles.

This discussion is probably coming across fairly negative, and I don't really mean it to.  It's precisely because of all these issues I admire good examples of puzzle games.  There is a good reason for Professor Layton's popularity.  It's probably dealing with the difficulty issue almost as well as a game of this type ever could.