Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Who likes there games extremily challenging ?
delete5230
Member EpicPosts: 7,081
I like my mmos extremely challenging.
I'll have to talk about off line games a little first.
A few months back a fellow gamer and I were talking about difficulty in video games. With a lot of hesitation, both of us were talking about enjoyable, and turning the difficulty down to enjoy the story and atmosphere. I say with a lot of hesitation because both of us didn't put too much thought into what we were saying. Easy is not that enjoyable !
Lately, my last games were Fallout 4 ( easy ) Assassin's Creed Syndicate ( way easy ) both were deep and robust but with little challenge other than a few bosses. I don't like to use the word boring, but more like they just faded away once I learned all the mechanics and the study of how the games work with all its bells and whistles. That was the only enjoyable part. Needless to say half way through each, I stopped, to never look back.
Now Dark Souls 3.......I avoided Dark Souls one and two because they were for the hardcore. The reviews scared me. Well another friend convinced me to play. Crazy hardcore ?......Not really.......Extremely challenging?.........Yes, you die a lot, and loose a lot. This keeps me thinking true out the day with " how do I do this ".
Remember that forgotten feeling of " how do I do this " with mmos ?
With " how do I do this " in mmo's keeps me playing......More complexing in mmo's is adding a world of like minded people to the mix. People at my disposal and me to others. I miss the day dreaming. I could sink myself into thought when the family or boss at work is screaming. Then I can come home and EXICUTE MY PLAN, BY ROUNDING UP A GROUP 
I'm setting up a poll for extremely challenging. I'm not expecting many here to agree since games like Black Desert Online seems to draw the non mmo players to this site......A little side question......How is BDO an mmo ?.....Because you log on ?
Comments
If I just wanted a challenge - I could simply strip my character of gear and go kill everything with my fists.
So, it's all about context.
PvP is where the challenge is for me. PvE is the tutorial.
I short story,
A few month ago my friends were all playing GW2. I decided to make a post here. So I logged in to get the names of a few abilities.
Well, I didn't park my character in a safe area, so I was getting randomly attacked.
As I'm writing a few notes, I would press a button...dead !....30 seconds passed by I would get attacked again, press a button...dead !.....By any ones standards how is this enjoyable ?
I recall the Batcave in DC Universe Online back when it was brand smack new as an extremely challenging thing. It was a complete turn off because not only was it damn near impossible to complete at that stage of the game, but the idea was to grind on it repeatedly in order to get the metric shit ton of tokens needed just to get one piece of equipment.
I'm betting that if someone were to go back and datamine that game you would be able to clearly see the population drop off shortly after hitting that point during that time.
On the other side of it you have Archeage. Probably the best and most comprehensive MMORPG in existence that has been utterly ruined by the players ability to circumvent the entire game by purchasing all of the rewards with real life money.
That thing isn't even a game. It's just a chute for people who don't like games to drop their money into so that they can make twitch videos and take screenshots pretending to be gamers.
Take the cash component out of Archeage and I'm thinking you would have a damn near perfect game. Make a superhero game as comprehensive as Archeage and without the cash component and you could probably write me off to daylight for the duration.
However, a game doesn't have to be difficult for me to have fun and ultimately, I play games for fun. Some games are designed well enough that players can create their own challenges and feel satisfied with the outcome.
I'll give you an example from when I played LotRO. Leveling was pretty standard quest hub grind, but the game had small power gaps and the combat was very deep. Whilst soloing, each pull would normally be 1-4 npcs, easy for the majority of players thus allowing everyone to level up. However, I'd be constantly pushing myself to take them down faster and in greater numbers. So, instead of pulling 4 normal mobs, I'd pull 6, then 7, then 8, trying to challenge myself to both master my class and increase my leveling speed.
Same sort of things with dungeons. First time it might take 2 hours to learn and clear it. After that, its all about optimisation. The game isn't necessarily offering me more challenge but the design was such that I could set my own challenges. During the Mirkwood expansion, there was only 1 6man dungeon (Sammath Gul). Average groups would take 1 hr to clear once tactics known. In my guild, we managed to get down to 19 minutes or so, whilst server record was 13 minutes.
This is more the sort of game design I like. I love challenge, but as I'm playing for fun I don't want to just hit a wall I can't clear, I'd rather the game was designed in such a way that pushing yourself and creating your own challenges was rewarding (such as increased loot, quicker leveling speed etc) but that you could fall back to the "default" strategy if you ever got truely stuck.
I like keeping difficult, "hard mode", games to myself, if I can. Like I said in another thread, in ds3 I had to use a summons on one boss.
Option 1 Better drop percentage in a really hard dungeon that takes skill and planning. (This will make me feel more rewarded for having the entire set)
Option 2 Easy Dungeon, but the drop rates are so low you would probably have to do it 1000 times to get everything... (This just means you have way more time than anyone else to run dungeons over and over again...)
Just my opinion...
I'm one of those players who would rather enjoy the game and story then sit there for hours on end and watch a bunch of youtube videos to figure out how to advance.
The mechanical challenge (like in old times, a perfect Pac-man game for example, or in MMO terms the raid dance choreography, the perfect rotation without a single mistake, etc.), don't care about it the slightest.
Back in the days ('80s, up until maybe the early '90s) I loved that, because I'm an achiever and it kept bugging me if I slipped on something. Well, not anymore... I barely can find enough time for playing, and when I do, I want to enjoy that playtime, and not working on something even a monkey (aka a bot) can do, with enough time.
So in this sense, I don't like it. Never did in MMOs, that's why I loathe the term "endgame grind" and all what's attached to it. Challenge through gameplay mechanics is dull and boring and just a waste of time. But it's just an opinion
Intellectual challenge, heck yes. A tougher puzzle in an adventure game, an investigation mission in TSW (or back then the ARGs of TSW), building decks around new ideas in a CCG, devising a working strategy for a situation in a board / strategy game... I love to spend days on that, during work, or while watching a movie, etc
So in this sense, I like challenge, but among MMOs I only have this in TSW.
The problem with making important things too difficult is you're going to turn away a lot of people.
Look at some of the threads on this site. To be frank, a lot of MMO players are not good at video games. Nothing wrong with that. MMOs exist imo for social interaction more than anything else.
One thing I've noticed is what some players consider to challenging are just time sinks, for example farming for hours to get a rare item so you can complete a quest isn't challenging, it's just a time sink and there is no challenge in it. Another example is running across the map to get somewhere rather than using some form of fast travel. That's no challenge, it's just another time sink.
Played: EQ, EQ2, Vanguard, WAR, WoW, LoTRO, CoX, CO, GW2, FFXIV: ARR, AoC, Rift, TSW, SWTOR, TERA, BnS, ESO
A real challenge tests your skills. Do you know how to heal the right targets at the right time? Do you know when to stop attacking the boss so the tank can grab aggro again? Do you use the appropriate counter abilities to keep the boss interrupted so its DPS is low enough for the healer to keep up with?
Notice that equipment is not part of the challenge or tedium. It should allow the player to make more mistakes or ignore mechanics of a fight when they are over-geared for the content. Making gear a chore to gather so the player can experience the content is tedious and makes the game less fun.
VG
There is a little addon that helps when you and your partner are Questing for that Hardcore experience.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee