Difficulty Options are Bullshit

Ooooh isn't that a shamelessly clickbaity title and image I used for this post?  When people read a title like that the first reaction I imagine is

"Just let people enjoy games the way they want!"

Or maybe some stupid comment that involves the word "Gatekeeping"

But despite my clickbaity title I'm not actually here to rag on you for playing easy OR big you up for playing hard.  People SHOULD just enjoy games in whatever way they want, that's totally fine and not something I have an issue with.  My issue really stems from the way that difficulty is implemented.

There are a lot of games that, when started, will prompt you for a selection of how hard you want it to be.  Games like Wolfenstien or Doom like to put fun little titles on it but most of the time it just boils down to Easy, Normal and Hard.  If you choose Normal you generally get the sort of experience that I feel was intended for that game.  Easy tends to make your character beefier, reduce incoming damage and gives you more resources to use while Hard does the opposite of this.  In MOST games I've experienced, in terms of actual technical skill at the game, there isn't really all that much difference between the 3 modes.  All that you're really choosing is how heavily you want to be penalized for any mistakes you make during play,

Metal Gear Solid is a good example of this.  On the harder modes there tends to be more enemies with longer vision ranges, they do more damage, caution mode gets triggered more easily, you can carry less stuff etc. etc. This at first glance is a fine approach to the issue, especially for a first time player.  Someone who isn't confident that they can stealth and fight effectively are allowed to take more hits, carry more ammo and healing, makes perfect sense to allow someone new to the series to enjoy it for all its worth.  Now if you're the kind of person who buys a game, does 1 play through and then shelves it for all eternity then maybe you will not understand my problem.  However if you do multiple replays you'll start to understand why this system is so dull.  The leap between easy to normal and normal to hard isn't that great, not really.  If you feel that you are bad at stealth games and you put it on easy, I can almost PROMISE you that after an hour of getting used to it, you'd be fine to turn it off, start again, and play on normal, or maybe even hard.  MGS only really starts to get really challenging when you go into its top modes but at that point its doing stuff like triggering a game over on being seen at any point which is bordering on levels of daft.

Nier is another good example on why I hate these options so much.  When I first played Nier I put it on Hard mode and the bosses took so little damage that the fights became tedious and I started to get bored during each encounter, especially in the early game.  However after I beat that and tried it on Normal the game turns all its enemies into paper mache.  The enemies and bosses are doing the exact same things they were doing in hard mode, only they died much faster.  This ruins that hard mode because all you're doing is making it take longer, you aren't actually challenging yourself in any way.

A game that has difficulty options that comes so very close to getting it right is Furi.

At the start of Furi you can choose between "Promenade" and "Furi" with an extra "Furier" difficulty after you beat the game.  I say it comes so very close because in reality, Promenade is a waste of time and Furi is ACTUALLY the sort of tutorial mode to get you acclimated to the "real" game in Furier.  Furi is a game essentially about mastery of its controls and knowledge of its bosses.  You study the bosses, learn what they do and how to avoid/parry their attacks and then once you have that down you dance circles around them while you cut them to ribbons with your sword.  If you played Promenande then I'm not judging you for doing so but I feel sorry that content of the game was just cut for you entirely and you didn't get a chance to learn those things to build that confidence.  Entire phases of bosses are cut on its easiest setting which means if you go from Promenade to Furi, you aren't getting extra challenge but you're seeing all new things and in a game like this that feels sort of unfair.

The solution to all this? Player modulated difficulty, designing your game in such a way that allows the player to decide how hard or how easy they want it as they go along.  Dark Souls, despite its reputation, is actually very good at this.  Having trouble with a boss? Go farm some souls and upgrade your weapon and come back and give him a slap.  Boss that's weak to fire giving you trouble? Go get some firebombs and stand halfway across the room and lob them, means that you have to learn about half the attacks.  But some people aren't willing or able to put in that kind of time so a better example I have of that is Hotline Miami

Hotline Miami lets you pick a mask at the start of each stage each with a unique ability and you can pick it depending on what's giving you the most trouble.  Are dudes swarming into a room and killing you? Wear the mask that lets you kill them with the door to make your life easier.  Dogs killing you? Wear the mask that turns off the dogs.  Struggling to find weapons? Wear the mask that makes your punches deadly.  This is a very elegant solution to the difficulty issue because it allows the player to identify the thing they are having trouble with on a stage by stage basis and give them an advantage in that specific area.  What makes it even better is that for weirdos like me that like their games on the daft side, there are even masks that make your surroundings dark so you can see shit or, even better, reverses your controls to make the game just needlessly confusing as fuck, it's great.

Difficulty levels should be abolished and games in general should just be designed in a smarter way.  Not only would that be much more interesting, I feel, for anyone of any skill level playing it but it would have the extra knock on effect of getting rid of that elitism that you see in certain people who only like hard games and people who like.  Some games I understand need these settings like shmups or rhythm games but for the most part I feel like this crap solution to this problem needs to go.

Paying To Save With Metal Gear Survive

This is a game I've mostly ignored.  I saw some of the initial stuff that was put out and I was so disgusted that I just ignored it from then on out.  It's a fucking disgrace that a series like Metal Gear Solid has been reduced to an online zombie survival game.  I mean the groundwork is there to make some kind of legit survival type game within the Metal Gear universe that you could play online but instead they just copped out and used fucking zombies.  But whatever, I'm sure fans of the series know how shit it is and even newcomers probably aren't going to be swayed when there's so many other fucking zombie games on the market.

What I'm mad about with this post is the news I caught wind of about how you save the game.  When you start the game you are given one save slot, if you want to have another save slot you have to pay 1000 "SV Coins" which is the games premium currency and this basically translates to $10.  Now people have been complaining about loot boxes recently but this just takes the fucking cake.

A loot box, by itself, isn't THAT bad of a thing.  The only game I'm currently involved in playing that has them is Overwatch and in that game the boxes contain nothing but cosmetic shit to make your character look different.  Someone who is level 50 and has opened a ton of boxes has no inherent advantage over the player at level 1 who has opened 0 but the level 50 guy probably looks a bit cooler.  This got shaken up a bit with Battlefront when the loot boxes started containing game changing shit like weapons and gear which meant that players who paid money had an advantage over those who didn't in a game that was already like $60 just to play in the first place.

But that's nothing, NOTHING compared to the bullshit that is being forced to pay money to save your game.  I guess it's another character slot or something like that but even then that's bullshit.  Imagine if you are the kind of person with lets say, 2 siblings who all love Metal Gear SO MUCH that all of you are willing to give Survive a chance.  So you log on Steam, you drop 35 fucking Pounds for the game itself and you make a dude and you have a grand old time.  Then your brother wants to play so now you have to pay an EXTRA £10 just to let him play his own guy because you don't want him fucking up your shit.  Then your sister comes along and decides SHE wants to play so that's ANOTHER £10 just so she can make her character and play.  That's £55 for the game and enough slots just to let people who live with you play.  Don't tell me "just share the one slot" either because if this was me and my wife, I wouldn't want here anywhere NEAR my save files, fuck that.

The only game I remember doing this other than this is FFXI and at least in the game you can KIND of justify having the one character because each job in that game levels up individually.  So if you wanted to play a thief and your brother wanted to be a black mage then those two jobs level up independently so while still bullshit at least you and someone else could, in theory, play your own shit.  Also my time with FFXI was extremely limited back in high school so there's even a chance I'm wrong about that one.

What's even worse is that not only is paying to save complete dogshit but the launch itself has been SO BAD that there's been an apology issued in the form of 100 SV coins.  So for your unplayable mess of a shitty Metal Gear game you get 1/10th of a save slot.  I get the feeling that this Metal Gear won't be Surviving for very long.

I'll see myself out.

Metal Gear Acid

Even though I beat this game a while ago, it's taken me more than a month to actually get on the blog and talk about it because it's just a bit shit.

"No way!" I hear you say, "There's no way in hell a bad Metal Gear Solid exists!".  Well before you start getting upset with me for slagging off Metal Gear, I'm not, I love Metal Gear but MGA is a fucking mess.

Story wise it's a pretty classic Metal Gear setup.  There's a bunch of terrorists who have invaded some place and they are after something that isn't called Metal Gear but is blatantly Metal Gear and it's up to you to stop it.  Since I'm writing this so long after finishing it I've kind of forgotten some of the plot.  Mainly it involved Metal Gear, some shit on a plane and child experimentation but the fact I've forgotten the plot might clue you in to just how forgettable and lack luster it was.

But the story isn't the reason Metal Gear Acid is a fucking mess.  No, the story is just a bit dull but it's the gameplay that really makes this game just unenjoyable.  In case you're not aware, Metal Gear Acid isn't played like any other Metal Gear game because this is a card game.

That's right, a fucking turn based CARD game.

 You have a deck of cards that fall into different categories such as weapons, items, actions and special effects that are represented by different characters.  Every card is used to move around the board and lets you move 3 spaces, while special movement cards will allow for greater movement.  Every card also has a cost, so the better cards cost more to use and that means that you have to wait longer between each turn.

Now the reason this game is a load of bullshit is because everything you do is dependant on what kind of cards you draw.  It's fine at first but there are certain points in the game where you NEED specific cards to do specific things and if you don't get lucky and draw your card then you'll just be sat there discarding shit for 5 or 6 turns until the card you eventually DO want shows up.

An example of this is there is a level where you are required to snipe flying cameras so that you can cross a bridge.  By that point in the game I had maybe 3 or 4 sniper rifle cards available, but I lost the mission multiple times because the game wouldn't give me the fucking cards to use, so they would just eventually move into my half of the map and spot me, calling a bunch of guards to enter the level and fuck me all up.

Now I guess you could just say to me "well why didn't you go and get more sniper rifles then?", but the problem with that is the only way to really get more cards quickly without having to tediously grind out old levels is to buy booster packs.  A booster pack gives you 3 cards, and usually it gives you 3 shit ones.  Through my entire playthrough I only got one rare card in a booster and the rare was so shit that I ended up never using it.  The one good thing about the boosters is the variety in the packs.  For example, at the start you only have access to Metal Gear Solid 1 themed cards, but as you progress you unlock MGS2, 3 and even Metal Gear 1 and 2 themed cards, so if you're the kind of person who enjoys collecting digital cards then you have a lot to work with here.

I'm being overly harsh when I say Metal Gear Acid is a fucking mess, but it's certainly frustrating and sometimes VERY unfun to play with certain levels being made an absolute chore by the games fucking stupid card thing.  Still though, it's a unique take on the Metal Gear series and maybe the sequel that I've not played is way better, so it's at least worth a quick go on your PSP.