inb4 Daikatana.

What do you do when you hit THAT part of a game, you know the one were everything was just peachy until the game decided you had enough fun times and now bad times are incoming.

It could be an incredibly hard boss, a level that's complete bullshit or anything where you#re stuck for hours and just lack the technical skill to advance. What do you do in those situations?

I basically have 2 methods:

If I like a game a lot, I usually don't give in. No lowering difficulties, no cheating. I'll put up with being the power bottom until the roles are reversed again.

If I'm already slogging through a game or something is just blatant bullshit, then i'll just say fuck it and lower the difficulty. If I still can't get ahead I'll try using cheats, but since that isn't really an option in most games nowadays, if I don't find any it`ll go straight into the recycle bin.

To answer directly to the topic title: I don't. They are too intimidating and scare me off.

If it's just a moment in a game I quit until I 'calm down' and try again later.
If it's the entire game I don't play it, I just don't enjoy that.

But sometimes a game seems innocent enough and then it turns out it has the worst sewer level in history (hi Redneck Rampage) or something like that. that never happened to you?

I am actually more likely to just give up the game, than lowering the difficulty midway for the hard parts. I gave up e.g. Forsaken when I realized its difficulty design is just bullshit and I shouldn't really waste my time with it. With some other games (like Freespace and Descent 3) I liked them enough otherwise that I did my best to finish the games.

I recall one exception: Tie Fighter. One of the very last missions in the last expansion pack is murderingly difficult in the highest difficulty level. I tried to finish it maybe a few hundred times... but in the end I lowered the difficulty to the easiest one just to finally get past that one mission, and play the rest of the game (again in the highest difficulty). I consider that I failed that one mission, even if I was able to clear it in the easiest difficulty (in which case it was actually quite easy, it seemed the enemy ships would blow up very easily while in the highest difficulty they were bullet sponges that took ages to destroy and did massive damage to your ship).

The thing is that in most cases the challenge is the first priority for me in a game, so I rather play with some higher (maybe even the highest) difficulty setting. Lowering difficulty midway feels more like cheating, or almost like not playing the game at all. If I didn't care for the challenge, I guess I could just play all games in the easiest possible difficulty setting (just to see the story and what the game has to offer), or enable godmode right at the start, or even just watch someone else playing it through on Youtube.

Sure there are then "sandbox games" like Minecraft etc. where the difficulty might not be the real reason to play the game... but as it happens, currently I don't feel any urge to play such sandbox games.


I've discussed the dilemma of difficulty settings in games before, and I agree with the note that games should be tried to design so that they don't even need different difficulty settings. Failing that, I personally think that the game designer and/or game testers should always be able to finish the game in the hardest difficulty level, without using cheats. If they can't, then that particular difficulty level should be removed from the game as unfinishable.

Like Forsaken: I am pretty convinced no one has ever finished the PC version in the highest difficulty level, without using cheats. Maybe it is theoretically possible (not even sure about that, considering the level time limits), but I have hard time believing someone has been able to pull it off.

So, why keep difficulty levels which are in practise impossible? Is the meaning really that no one can finish the game in that difficulty level?

Fun killer. If enjoyable game/franchise and it's just ridiculously difficult sometimes I'll fight with it until proficient. Or I'll sleep on it and try it again fresh at a later time (far too often there will be a brutally unforgiving section in something and when I try it the next day while half paying attention I'll manage it on the first go).

If the game is kinda enjoyable before hitting the unfun "wall of difficulty", depending on the nature of the difficulty spike I might cheese it, rebalance it via cheat engine, or just cheat past it.

Worst case scenario where it's just tedious unfun shite, it goes from the "to-play" list into the "fuck-it" pile.

Set it on fire or send it to the digital graveyard...

I like this question. In addition to trying a few hundred times, I go on hiatus. Like, sometimes 6 months long and maybe a year. Play some other games and such. Then I come back to it and Boom. Beat.

I've done this for Grand Theft Auto 3 and Metal Gear Solid 2. One of them, I was actually making a really stupid mistake. In the end, when I was done, it was a good laugh. Both great games.

For games like Dragon Ball Z Budokai and Mortal Kombat, have just spent so much time just trying over and over and over again. To the point of obsession and poor performance in school and no sleep. When it was finally done and the story progresses, it feels great.

Nowadays, I sometimes look up letsplays and guides but only in the most extreme situations. One thing I had to do this for was for a certain race in Banjo Tooie. I have come to realize that some games, for example, The Witcher are both challenging enough but also enjoyable and the most important thing...

There has to be a balance or the game becomes Unenjoyable. Game mechanics can really put a cog in your murder machine.

It depends. For example:

If the game has a really obnoxious final boss, I may play up to that boss and then stop. Similarly if the difficulty gets to be too much (happened to me in Elminage Gothic in the final post-game dungeon; even for me as an RPG veteran, it was too much for me).

If the game has a mandatory minigame that's both difficult and out-of-genre (this includes things like stealth sequences), there is a good chance that I will simply not play that game, or if I already have, I will likely not re-play the game. (Offenders here are Zelda: Ocarina of Time (stealth where being seen = thrown out) and Chrono Trigger (button mashing; if I replay, it will be with the equivalent of a turbo controller for that one part).

If possible, I may occasionally cheat, particularly if I run into a nasty design flaw. (For example, Wizardry Gaiden 3 has locked doors that you need a thief to open, and since I had none (my bard was filling the thief's role just fine with respect to chests), I cheated a thief's level up really high so I could unlock those doors.)

Edit: Shovel Knight is an example of a game where I played up to the final boss, and then decided I didn't like the boss fight and just cheated to unlock the Plague of Shadows expansion, which I have beaten fairly.

It really depends on the game, and the nature of the "difficulty". A few examples

Indiana Jones and the Emperors Tomb- most of the game is actually not that hard at all (including the surprisingly easy final boss). But near the end there is one level where you have to run from a drill-tank (or whatever you call it) through a tunnel while jumping over pitfalls. It doesn't sound that bad, but the game makes it almost impossible because for that one level the camera angle changes from what you have through the entire game, to make the escape more cinematic I guess, but the effect is that it's next to impossible to judge distances and time the jumps well. It pissed me off, but I made it through, mostly because I really wanted to finish the game, and becasue the level is short, so even repeating it dozens of times didn't waste too much of my time.

Blackguards- I hated doing it, but I had to lower the difficulty for the two final fights. There is just too much luck involved. No matter how well you plan things you can still lose the whole battle because of a one unlucky "dice roll". It's evocative of the tabletop experience I guess, but in a single player computer game it's no fun. If I couldn't lower the difficulty I'd probably just quit- it would take countless hours to get a lucky enough run to win otherwise.

Demon Stone- the final fight is downright unbeatable for me, and I gave up on it entirely. Only one of the three characters deals any damage to the final boss, and if you lose the fight, you start the entire level again, not just the boss fight. It's tedious beyond belief and a total waste of the players time.

So basically - don't waste my time. Challenging is good. Wasting my goddamn time is bad. Let me save whenever I want or at least have checkpoints often. Otherwise I'll lose patiance fast.

If something really is "complete bullshit", I simply Alt+Tab out of the game and watch a Let's Play on Youtube to get past the boss/puzzle/level. Complete bullshit is complete bullshit and I'm not playing games to torture myself. Of course this doesn't count for roguelikes or games like Dark Souls, where dying a lot is just a part of the normal gameplay.

Life is Strange is a good example. It's a modern, Telltale-style adventure game. It's 100% story focused and 99% of the "puzzles" are no-brainers (I wouldn't even call them puzzles). But then there's that one single puzzle, the 1%, that's absolutely out of place. It could very well be a puzzle from a point and click adventure from the 90's. Without spoilering anything: You have three pools of random evidence. From each pool you have to pick the correct pieces of evidence to get the final clue. The game turns from a laid-back storytelling adventure, into a classic adventure. The story, the thing that IS the game, gets interrupted.

Why would I want to "stop" playing a game that I love, only to annoy myself with "another game" that I don't like? I just googled a walkthrough, connected the correct pieces of evidence and went back to enjoy one of my most favourite games ever.

RAGE

and then keep trying over and over and over to the point that i want to put my foot through the TV/monitor and jump on my computer/console.

it is at this point i walk away, cursing obscenities at the game and it's developers for being idiots.

I then come back and try again.

rinse and repeat b/c i'm a crazy pants competitive asshole.

Speaking of 90s adventure games I consider those in their own special difficulty category. I don't mind struggling through puzzles, but the insane off the wall shit with the pixel hunts (or worse the stuff that only works if you do a bunch of unrelated steps in an exact order) I'll just pull up a guide for. I like the games, I like the art (even in the wonkier titles), and I don't mind the plots... but I am not gonna spend hours trying every combination under the sun hoping I trip over the answer.

This is pretty much the sole consideration for me when dealing with "extreme difficulty".

...no, I did not totally failed at the 2nd level of Redneck Rampage and did not got totally owned by that game. No sir, never happend.

.. it totally bitchslapped me :(

Like the OP said, if its a game I respect then I will work on the problem until I figure it out, beat the problem and get that warm glow for accomplishment. Otherwise, if a game is full of annoyances and I am only in it to see the final story being played out then I run for a walkthru ( next) lower difficulty (last) use a console cheat to get thru the rough patch. If the game is really borderline enjoyment then I leave the easiest mode toggled on just to see how it ends. The last drastic thing I will do is, if a game really sucks mechanics wise or other glitches, dev idiocies or what not, I go to a 'lets play' vid and watch the rest of the game to sate my curiosity.



real life is crap enuf without my entertainment copying it