Challenge Accepted: Why fake difficulty is still a thing
Fakin’ it.
Fake difficulty isn’t a term of praise. Which is kind of obvious from the name, I know.
If you’re not well-versed in fake difficulty as a named concept, you’ll still know it when you see it. The mandatory stealth section when this game had not required any stealth gameplay before now. The camera angles that shift when you make a jump. The sudden mechanical shift into a whole new sort of game that you may not be any good at. A hunt for an object that would be easy to find… if not for the total lack of distinguishing marks from the background.
TVTropes does a good job listing the many, many flavors of fake difficulty, but it only briefly touches upon the fact that it’s not entirely bad. There are a few reasons it still shows up in games, though, and while some of them are bad, a couple of them are actually better than the alternative. So why is fake difficulty still a thing?
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy III, part 7
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
I shudder to think at what would happen if the Light Warriors were to put in an application for an airship loan at this point in the game. They’d be laughed out of the office. Our first airship got blown up, we used our second one for about three minutes before getting it chained up by some jerk who may have broken one of the foundations of the planet, and then once we get that back we get it shot down in minutes. The skies here are just evil.
Leaving aside the fact that we can’t keep a flying ship in the air, of course, there is the minor fact that the Light Warriors are trapped somewhere strange after having their ship shot out from underneath them. As we were in a vehicle at the time, everyone is perfectly fine but the ship is destroyed, leaving us kind of up the creek. Boy, I sure hope this doesn’t mean we’re about to all be forced into changing classes for a big gimmick section!
(That is exactly what we’re going to have to do.)
Creating the environment
You threw me into the arena, don’t be surprised that I plan to fight now.
During a conversation the other night with a fellow Final Fantasy XIV player, a statement was made: “It’s not the developers’ fault how players behave.” Which intrigued me, because it’s a sentiment that I see a lot, and one that makes logical sense. It’s also one that’s almost entirely wrong.
Obviously, developers are not coming into your house at night to tell you how the game should be played, or including notes in the instruction manual. Although that would be kind of funny from a perverse standpoint: “press A to jump, but don’t do it in level 3 because that’s not the right way to play.” But the developers are totally telling you how to play, and if you’re breaking the game or playing in a way that’s not fun for you or anyone, that’s entirely the fault of the development team.
It all comes down to the environment you create and what you encourage. Because that’s what tells you how to play the game anyway.
Demo Driver 8: Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (#98)
And you find yourself thinking “I could be playing a game that’s just as dude-centric but with Joe Mad designs,” so that’s not a ringing endorsement.
The Castlevania franchise has been in an odd place as years have gone by. It has produced a lot of classic games over the years, lots of stuff well worth playing, and it’s one of the few franchises to pull of a wholesale genre switch successfully. It’s been good, by and large. Sure, not every game has been a thunderous success, but there’s a sense of continuity just the same. And there’s a conscious effort by the people in charge not to just turn Castlevania into a franchise of the same thing every few years – see also the mention of a wholesale genre switch above.
At the same time, one wonders how many stories you’ve really got about shaggy dudes going off to fight Dracula in a big old castle over and over.
I commend Castlevania: Lords of Shadow for what it’s trying to do, totally. I commend it for being a reboot, I commend it for once again trying to reinvent the series in terms of gameplay, and I can’t say that it’s doing a bad job, exactly. But I can say that it’s a game which would have been better served had it come out three years earlier or so, and I can’t say it sports a particularly good demo. Even if it does feature Sir Patrick Stewart.
Telling Stories: Breaking into the middle
When I first went to college, I had a very simple goal: do better there than I had in high school. I had a sound guideline to help me establish that, as well. I figured that if my first instinct about what to do in any situation had resulted in acting the way I had all through high school, clearly the best course of action would be to gauge my first instinct and then do the opposite in any situation. Thus, when I saw a pretty girl and a guy chatting at the first meeting of the school’s anime club, I decided the logical course of action was to walk right up and invite myself to the conversation.
The result? Well, the pretty girl wound up marrying me and the guy roomed with me in college for several years and is still a dear friend. But that was lucky, since my behavior was so screamingly rude that I’m relatively certain I should have been sent to Behavior Jail. But of course, how else are you going to insert yourself in a social situation when roleplaying? Yes, there were dozens of other options open to me as a person in the real world, but if you see interesting roleplaying go down, how do you take part without making your character a rude, abrasive jerk?
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 