What's the difference between real difficulty and artificial

>>387929965
One is naturally formed while the other is man made. Not hard senpai

Ninja Gaiden combat = Real difficulty
Ninja Gaiden platforming = Artificial difficulty

File: shrine.png (1MB, 1280x600px) Image search: [Google]

1MB, 1280x600px

>>387929965

>>387930084
I love naturally formed non-man-made video games.

>>387929965
Real difficulty: games I like
Artificial difficulty: games I don't like

>>387929965
Real difficulty = Whatever isn't too hard for me to beat!
Artificial difficulty = Whatever is too hard for me to beat!

Note that after completion of real difficulty, one must brag how easy and not difficult it was since they were able to beat it.

>>387930247
>/v/ in a nutshell

File: 1347311859279.gif (2MB, 162x191px) Image search: [Google]

2MB, 162x191px

Fighting a boxing match = difficult
Fighting a boxing match with one hand tied behind your back = artificially difficult

>>387930084
Naturally occurring video games are hard to come by! The mining costs to go that deep to find one are astronomical, we should really just settle for the man-made games since they're far better than the stuff in the mines anyways!

>>387929965
To me it's
Real: Mechanics that require solid reflexes / timing, creative thinking, and the ability to adapt to the situation / boss
Artificial: The boss has more HP and you have less than before. The fight is the same only you have to hit him more.

>>387929965
Say there is an enemy boss that uses a set of attacks at random. When he uses two specific attacks in a row, it is literally 100% impossible to survive. So to beat him you need him to not use those two attacks in a row. You'll probably have to fight him many times even if you're super good, that's artificial difficulty.
Of course that is an absolute case.

>>387930153
Triggered.

>>387930390
If there is a reason to even use the word artificial difficulty as it was meant to be, this anon gets it.
Most people used to refer to it as something where the game puts you at a direct disadvantage and doesn't give you a way to figure your way out of it
Too bad it's just a buzzword for idiots now

>>387930390
>>387930721
You're both dumb

File: bed-of-chaos-large.jpg (132KB, 600x338px) Image search: [Google]

132KB, 600x338px

This is artificial difficulty because the boss can one hit the player without any fault of their own.

>>387930784
>calling random people dumb instead of arguing their point that you disagree with

You're one of those idiots I mentioned

>>387929965
>Real difficulty.
The game is difficult by its own merits, not because of stupid and unintended things, such as piss-poor controls or a shoddy as fuck framerate.

>Artificial Difficulty
Shitty controls where there's clear input delay, by you're required to respond to things in a split-second. Also input queues which cause you to perform unintended actions well after the fact.

DaS3 has both of these, and they're the only reason Nameless King is even remotely difficult. Put him in a well-polished game like DMC3/4 or Ninja Gaiden and he'd be a joke.

>>387930861
I honestly wouldn't have minded this boss if getting back to it wasn't such a pain in the ass too. If there had been a bonfire INSIDE lost izalith so that I could just run back in a couple of seconds and try again it wouldn't have been nearly as annoying

>>387931050
>Put a boss where the characters are incredibly nimble and agile, have far more moves at their disposal and can launch enemies and he'll be easier
You don't say.

I think what separates the two is how much the player's skill determines the outcome. If there is a chance that something might happen due to RNG that is practically guaranteed to be a failure state then it's artificial e.g. crits several times in a row.

>>387930561
this.

Difficulty that require you thinking about how you're going to deal with things, allowing you do change and adapt, will always be better than brainless increase in life and damage.

Example : borderlands 2 difficulty is completely retarded, by lvl 65+ / 71, ennemies have so much health you need several minutes to kill them, and deal so much damage that they will one shot you no matter what kind of gear you have

>>387931218
The rolls have less iframes in those games than DaS3 though. Even Bayonetta, a game with a ridiculous dodge mechanic, has only 1/4th a second of iframes on her roll, whereas DaS3 has almost half a second.

>>387931506
DaS III is also a much slower game and it's balanced around the given i-frames anyways.

File: resident-evil-2.jpg (21KB, 474x267px) Image search: [Google]

21KB, 474x267px

Real difficulty is when overcoming the obstacle is a matter of you not being good enough.

Artificial difficulty is when the game is intentionally broken/poorly designed and it is made your job to fix it.

Best example of the latter is the old Resident Evil tank control scheme. Sure, you get used to it, but it was always just fucking tedious and made you feel more like you were fighting the game itself rather than zombies/monsters. Getting from A to B or dodging a hall full of zombies was not hard in principle, they were just asking you to do it with your shoe laces tied together.

It depends on the game and genre, honestly.

Artificial difficulty to me is when you:

-Get fucked over hard by RNG and get in a situation that would screw you over no matter what you do (Like a enemy stun-locking you constantly and not being able to hit back).

-Taking away core abilities or attacks that you used during the game to artificially lengthen a section or make it harder. Can work well if balanced well, but comes off more as a annoyance in a lot of stuff.

-Making the game needlessly complicated compared to other games in the same genre just to slow down the game/hide that you have next to no content (Lunar: Dragon Song and how it handled leveling and getting items is a prime example, basically forcing you to grind twice. MP death in Star Ocean 3 was also bullshit).

-Get fucked over by bad design choices or glitches (Sonic Adventure series is a prime example. The recent Crash remakes and the bridge levels are another big one).

-Bosses that are way higher stats then they should for a certain area, have cheap attacks that either one shot you or nearly kill you, are damage sponges, and are required to progress. Basically where you are relying on the RNG not to screw you and no amount of leveling or skill will help.

-Kill box style rooms with a billion enemies, no pickups, no heals, and is checkpointed where you have to do it all over if you die (More common in FPS games).

Those are a few examples I have personally run across and feel are unwarranted.

Artificial difficulty is anything that requires trial and error or gambling to survive rather than skill over the mechanics

>>387929965
>artificial: health pool is gigantic for an enemy making it take longer and appear to be more difficult when it is just artificially raising the health bar. also making you hit less is another artificial difficulty.

real difficulty: movements and game mechanics take time to get good with. when you see a skill gap vary greatly due to mechanics it is actual difficulty.

File: 1402715097456.png (351KB, 972x844px) Image search: [Google]

351KB, 972x844px

>>387929965
I think everyone has different values on what is real vs artificial difficulty. To me there's not one simple statement that clearly addresses it.

For example in games like HL2, putting it on the hardest difficulty is actually legit real difficulty. You can still one shot enemies but now they can also kill you insanely fast. Most FPS have a good handle on difficulty.

But if you look at a series like TES, setting the slider on the hardest difficulty is purely artificial. Not only do the enemies do an unreal amount of damage (which the player can do little to avoid, especially if melee), the enemies also get increased health pools which make them giant damage sponges. This makes the game unfair as now the enemies take longer to kill but also kill you faster.

For a game to be difficult it has to also be fair. If the game is unfair then the difficulty itself is rigged as a result.

>>387929965
Real Difficulty: tricky situations you can overcome by practice

Artificial Difficulty: when it breaks the fourth wall about the game itself, i.e. glitches, hard controls, gameplay based on RNG, all of Edmund McMillen's games

>>387929965
I guess you could say that "natural difficulty" would be about balancing the game so that the game's logic is very similar to the real world.

ie headshots or something, where you know that, in real life, people don't usually survive being shot in the head.

yea, I'm high, but I think I'm onto something...

Normal difficulty = a challenge you feel good about beating
Artificial difficulty = a challenge that makes you say "Christ I'm glad that's over"

File: 1501891867041.gif (833KB, 700x600px) Image search: [Google]

833KB, 700x600px

>>387933376
Don't forget hack and slashes. Rising and Devil May cry 1,3,4 Made enemies a little tougher and gave them different move sets and aggressiveness

File: when the season premier is just right, laddie.jpg (146KB, 1223x915px) Image search: [Google]

146KB, 1223x915px

I think Terraria had a great show of difficulty in its "expert mode". Enemies had slightly increased health and defense, but the real challenge came from their entirely new AI scripts, which told them to have new attacks, be more aggressive, have additional effects and debuffs, and so much more. I think it's an excellent show of proper difficulty settings.

>>387934558
This. I appreciate when a game actually balances its gameplay modes with new, additional things instead of just buffing enemies and nerfing your damage and health. I think adding new AI routines or attacks is perfectly fine, and gives me a reason to replay a game.

Like MGS2's difficulties. While some of what I mentioned do apply, there are a variety of other things that were added throughout the game that change depending on your difficulty.

Real difficulty: fighting artorias in ng+ while naked with power within
Fake difficulty: that phase of the near a tomato fight against eve where all your shit is disabled and you have to crawl out of the way of them bullets

File: 1321220381218.gif (2MB, 278x166px) Image search: [Google]

2MB, 278x166px

>>387930153
I can definitely see what they THOUGH Shrine of Amana was after I've beaten it dozens of times, but holy christ was that area retarded. If you had a bow, it is """"tolerable"""". If you didn't, the area is just an absolute mess with zero saving graces.

>>387929965
>real difficulty
things you can control for through skill
>artificial difficulty
no improvement of skill or use of clever mechanics will help you overcome it, just luck and/or sheer perseverance.

in essence, artificially difficult things are hard because you can't mitigate them through skill or strategy. Actual difficulty is hard because it tests your ability to play the game well consistently.

If you can out-skill or out-ability the game's challenges, the difficulty is real. If you are in no way adequately equipped to handle a situation, both in terms of raw potential statistical values and in terms of mechanical understanding, the difficulty is artificial.

For example, real difficulty:
https://youtu.be/RDx4ak6zOyg

And its artificial counterpart:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxJXEidpWzc

>>387929965
The only thing I'd really classify as artificial difficulty is bugs and other technical problems, like if a projectile suddenly goes invisible or the game slows to a crawl and becomes unresponsive.

People can point to things like trial and error gameplay and say that it is artificial difficulty but the challenge is supposed to be in memorization and learning the games tricks.

File: Packshot.jpg (1MB, 1176x1688px) Image search: [Google]

1MB, 1176x1688px

>>387929965
Artificial difficulty the genre.

>>387932683
This explanation is poetry.

>>387929965
Whatever the original meaning was, it's now literally bad difficulty vs good difficulty, with all the subjectivity that implies.
Artificial difficulty is just used to imply objectivity.
Artificial objectivity if you will.

I'll just drop some bossfight concepts since it's a much more straightforward way to describe the two variants.

Natural difficulty:
>Boss has a wide list of potential moves with all sorts of dangers that can kill you if you're inattentive, but as you improve at reading patterns and tells they become much more straightforward to handle but still require attention
>Obviously a boss will have high stats, but all are within logical boundaries and even with grinding the boss remains difficult because of his various patterns and attacks that still require a modicum of skill
>Losing isn't a slap on the wrist but it isn't damning either, maybe forcing you to face a few more enemies before you return to the fight due the distance between the checkpoint and the fight, in games with a life system there's the obvious game over situation
>Altogether satisfying due to your improved skills at the game or demonstrating what skill you already have

Artificial difficulty:
>Boss has a few moves he juggles between but they all have awful hitboxes, next to no telegraphing, and possibly do obscene amounts of damage with little ot no way to easily recover
>Critical stats for combat such as health, damage, and defense are all obnoxiously bloated to the point you have to grind juts to even make a reasonable chunk out of his health
>Losing either sends you all the way back to the start of the level no matter what or just plops you right back outside the fight so you can storm back in and get facerolled repeatedly until you essentially headbutt a hole into a brick wall
>Any satisfaction is more just no longer having to deal with an uninteresting and tedious bossfight for six hours straight and not because of any improved skill

>>387929965
"artificial difficulty" is resentful-person coinage. "It's not that I suck, it's just that the difficulty isn't even real!" Artificiality has nothing to do with anything.

When people use "artificial difficulty" to describe inevitable deaths, that's not a difficulty issue at all, that's just bad game design. When they describe enemies with shit tons of health, that's not artificial difficulty either, just a test of enduring an enemy a bit longer than usual. Is there a single case where this phrase actually describes something artificial, and isn't some dumbfuck just trying to pass the buck on their unbearable failure?

>>387930390
That's still real difficulty, just the kind of difficulty that's based on being crippled. The more fruitful kind of difficulty is when you're assimilating something complex and unknown, like growing a third arm, which brings new capacities and downfalls (whatever that would be for having a third arm).

t. People who can't git gud

>>387929965
Real difficulty is when a faggot wins and pretends he beat a very difficult game/enemy/boss

Artificial difficulty is when the same faggot loses and pretends that it is the game's fault for having fake difficulty.

difficulty
>need a running start to make a jump
artificial difficulty
>the jump is the same no matter what you do. In order to make the jump successfully the player needs to jump at the last pixel of the platform because the jump is only just enough to make the gap

>>387929965
the ultimate example has to be total war games. The ai in the battles isn't challenging on easy and the campaign ai is around normal competence, any higher and they have to have absurd buffs to their economies, basically no resource/gold limitation and massive buffs to their troops. The ai is as or less competent as it was in Rome 1.

>>387930447
someday I want to travel to the core of the sun, which is where all the best games are made

>>387937060
Difficulty
>need to jump to beat a game
artificial difficulty
>need to fully press the jump button to beat the game

>>387930084
its true tetris was first discovered in nature

>>387931050
Have you played the game? Nameless King is difficult for people because HE delays his attacks and they dodge too fast or think they're safe and attack.

>>387937327
Even then, there's still no point in calling that artificial difficulty. It's just a low-level way of making a game harder. You still need some degree of creativity to beat enemies that "cheat" like that, and it still makes the game difficult. Nothing artificial about that. It's just a lesser approach that we're all bored of now.

Ideally the enemies would challenge you with more sophisticated patterns of behavior instead of cheat codes, which would be pretty amazing for a game like Total War or Civilization, but that's just better game design. Both are "real" kinds of difficulty, one is just a much better form of game design than the other.

>>387935046
Dumbest post in this thread.

Your "real" difficulty is literally artificial because of self imposed challenges.

Your "fake" difficulty is not difficult and is not meant to be difficult, the point of that scene is immersion and if you have trouble with beating it you should seriously step it up.

>>387930106
/thread

>>387929965
they're buzzwords, you don't need to understand them because any person smart enough to use them correctly can also articulate their point without them. The most important questions when it comes to difficulty are:

Am I skilled enough at the task at hand to progress in the game?

If not, am I getting enough enjoyment out of this game to motivate myself to improve to the point where I can progress?

If not, then stop playing. If someone says you give up too easily, tell them to mind their own business. If they refuse to leave your property and you live in Texas, shoot them.

>What's the difference between real difficulty and artificial difficulty?

There are two ways to defined it. The regular definition of artificial difficulty is lack of fairness.

Real difficulty is when boss has a very complicated attack pattern, with only brief telegraphs, and high damage. That makes him hard, but ultimately predictable: combination of careful observation and learning his patterns will eventually give you the advantage you need to kill him.

Artificial difficulty introduces mechanics and elements that you can't predict, that are random or arbitrary. Like using untelegraphed attacks. Randomized destruction of scenery that you can't predict and that can just disappear under your legs.
Basic, hard-to-dodge attacks having chance of doing random extra effect - like just throwing you off the map once in 10 cases.
Enemies designed with abilities to introduce chain-stuns that you can't get out off.

Generally: artifical difficulty is then the game just kinda rolls the dice and screws you on that, without giving you option to prepare and anticipate it.

A good way to compare it is having non-artifical and artificial difficulty encounter, having an equally skilled player go through them, facing similar enemies... but the one going through the artificially hard level will (despite being equally competent at the game) more deaths.

Simply because artificial difficulty is a design that deprives the player of the option to compensate or participate. It's hard, but it's not hard because it requires more skill - it's hard because it's unfair.

That is artificial difficulty.

real difficulty: it's fun to beat
artificial difficulty: it's not fun to beat and this flaw doesn't lie with the general game mechanics themselves, but the specific challenge posted

>>387937772
I've played DaS3 a ton, and having played actual action games with much more well-designed bosses, I can say without a doubt that Nameless King is only difficult because he exploits the game's poor controls.

>>387939216
The only thing he exploits is the typical mindless reaction that the entire series made the players develop, namely instant roll at the start of any non-idle animation of the boss.

His lightning bolt that strikes after a delay from the sky is more obvious in this but most if not all of his attacks are slightly delayed but telegraphed enough to make you dodge.

Other games with better controls and bosses have nothing to do with this shit and after what you said I doubt your judgement on that anyway.

>>387929965
As a 32 year old whose best friend has been into game development since we were kids (he's now at a $10mil tech startup that acts as a middleman by selling code libraries to AAA studios), I just look at it in terms of AI and HP.

Psychic AI (enemies knowing when you are peaking on an FPS, not needing to scout on RTS, etc.) and having absurd amounts of HP are considered hallmarks of poor game design. People eat that shit up though so I've given up trying to explain it to people.

>>387929965
It's real when I can beat the boss and artificial when I can't.

>>387930161
>>387930447
>>387937705
I laughed way too hard at these.

>>387939528
He attacks too fast, exploiting the input delay on rolling that's there because it's also inexplicably the run button. So you'll get hit if you don't roll early, meaning that the developers can shove delays on his attacks to punish the player, knowing full well that the game has created muscle-memory for the need to roll early.

Then to put a layer on top of that, since he attacks both fast and slow intermittently, he also times his attacks to purposely punish the series' retarded input queue system. Meaning that if you roll late and get hit, or roll early and get hit, he will hit you a second time. The lack of Poise in DaS3 also means that you'll generally get stunned by the second hit for just long enough to get his a third time.

Add onto that the fact that he flies around like a DBZ character to exploit the shoddy camera and noob-trap lock on feature, that he does absurd damage like everything else in the game, and has a first phase that's just easy padding, and you have a fight that was made to capitalize on DaS3's bad mechanics.

>Other games with better controls and bosses have nothing to do with this shit and after what you said I doubt your judgement on that anyway.
Comparisons were drawn to better illustrate the problems with DaS's controls. DaS3 wanted to be an action game with anime bosses, but didn't want to put the work into developing polished controls, which forces the player to learn a certain way to play against the input system, then adds a boss that exploits the input system to make it a harder fight than it would be otherwise.

It's what would be a textbook example of artificial difficulty, because the player has to go through and unlearn all the things they needed to learn during the entire rest of the game. So basically, rather than being an encounter that builds on what the game established, it just punishes the player for learning how to become accustomed to From's inability to create a game with good controls.

>>387940085
Generally I agree with what you said but I really don't like when people bring up the high HP thing. A boss having high HP makes it necessary to actually learn the fight and Dark Souls is a good example of that. People bitch about "bloated" hp on 2nd DLC bosses but the truth is that most previous bosses had too little HP and scrubs could beat them just with brute force without properly learning the patterns. TRC bosses on the other hand have enough HP to make it non-viable while having little enough HP not to be bloated.

What I want to say is that high HP serves a certain purpose in many cases and it CAN be artificial difficulty but doesn't have to be at all.


To give an example of actual artificial difficulty: an RTS AI that sees the entire map and generates resources faster than you even if you technically have more generators (buildings, workers or whatever). Also rubberbanding in racing games.
>>387940509
Nameless King is slow as fuck, I really don't understand where you're coming from.

Camera is a problem in the garbage first phase only.

I also hate input queueing but I haven't found it to be more of a problem in this particular fight than anywhere else.

Poise is in game and works better than ever.

DS3 made some bosses have delayed attacks, NK being one of them, and once you learn how to fight them you become a better user of the game's system because you panic roll much less and actually read attacks better so you know the right moment to dodge. As such I consider it to be a good addition to the series.

>>387929965
Real difficulty arises out of robust design decisions to create a particular and intended set of challenges to be overcome. An intelligent player making rational decisions based on available inputs and given feedbacks will reliably succeed. Artificial difficulty is an arbitrarily likely fail rate created by various means. An intelligent player making rational decisions based on available inputs and given feedbacks will not reliably succeed.

In the former case, the rules that govern the game are applied in a robust manner, in the latter, they're not. The more complex a game is the harder it can be to suss out whether difficulty is fake or real. There's extreme 'I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 10,000 and if you get it wrong your save gets wiped and you have to start the game over. To put it another way, real or natural difficulty is a game. Artificial difficulty is gambling.

>>387929965
if you think something difficult yet fun its "real" and if you don't think it's fun its "artificial"
in the end all difficulty is artificial so these terms mean nothing

>>387941376
I think souls is just plagued by balance issues. My problem with souls boss HP is when it's obviously not balanced for whatever build I am running. The problem is also further compounded by terrible boxes. I don't really view souls as a major example of too much HP because they generally have other glaring flaws like the ones I just mentioned. I'm generally more concerned with normal enemy bullet sponges and the like.

File: image.jpg (201KB, 900x1200px) Image search: [Google]

201KB, 900x1200px

>Real difficulty
A hallway with one enemy that has good AI, can block, parry, heal and feels like an actual challenge to the player but is not unfair or does not feel cheap.

>Artificial diffculty
A hallway that has 5 enemies with 2 archers on the back and game is not designed for co bat with multiple enemies. Obstacle is made annoying to give illusion of challenge.

>>387941376
>Poise is in game and works better than ever.
Rest of the post is invalidated by this. DaS3's poise is a joke.

>DS3 made some bosses have delayed attacks
DaS2 did this, and even DaS1 did this to a much less extent, so this comment and the previous one praising "poise" in DaS3 makes me think you've never played another entry.

>>387942374
Of course some bosses in previous game had this. Fucking Smelter Demon did the same thing and people bitched that he's bullshit. DS3 just made more use of this trick.

As for your opinion on poise I bet you think it worked best with the absolutely ridiculously broken system of DS1 which, if anything, further invalidates your posts. Literally go do some pvp in DS3 and you'll see that poise works well and is useful but at the same time not broken like in DS1 where it was the be-all-end-all thing both in pvp and pve. I'll remind you that the most basic strategy for 4K was just havel poising through all attacks. What a great mechanic, right?