Absolutely 100% agree. Currently playing Dragon Age on its EASIEST setting for this very reason. I don't WANT to redo combat over and over. I also don't want to obsessively buff, min-max characters or build my party composition for maximum combat ability instead of for interest.
 

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Two points:

1) There always needs to be a natural ebb and flow to the gameplay, high points balanced by low points, and that includes difficulty. In other words, for every difficult encounter, ease back afterwards and allow the player to regroup.

2) I do not believe that players necessarily want an easy game -- what they want is a sense of progress and achievement. But players will have different skill levels and expectations, so it makes sense to provide a way for a player to adjust the difficulty level.
 

One more thing that I think is very important: Always provide an "out" for the player if he does find that something is too difficult. Provide alternatives. It may sound a bit heretical to the old school game designers, but you can just let the player detour past the parts that are too difficult for him. I mean, why not? As long as he's having fun...
 

@RandomGamer - I suspect --- no, strike that, I know for a fact - that punitive difficulty levels are often put in games to disguise their brevity. This has been a practice from at least the NES days. I was a wuss and played Bioshock on the easiest difficulty level because it was a rental. I think I finished it in about 75% of the time most people did - and it wasn't just missing optional content.

@Xenovore - excellent points, and 100% correct IMO. This is one of the strengths of RPGs - even if you find yourself at a temporary roadblock, you can go and grind or sub-quest for a bit to make some progress AND put yourself in a better position to overcome the roadblock. Gain an extra level, pick up a few more potions...

And the last thing you want is a linear progression of difficulty. It may generally be progressing higher, but you do need the peaks and valleys. After a big ol' nasty boss encounter, it's good to have some weaker fights to remind yourself of how you have progressed.
 

Well, as with most statements of this sort, absolutes aren't correct in either direction.

Extremely easy RPGs just feel like a waste to me. You can have plenty of fancy mechanics, elegant combat resolution, and character customization, but if all you need to *do* is hit attack over and over again, it's just a drag.

Difficulty in RPGs is hard to get right, though. Getting through action games is at least partially physical skill, something that practice can improve. In an RPG, where you're living and dying by the numbers, it can be difficult to craft a difficult-but-meaningful combat. If the proper response to a difficult situation is to level up more or buy better gear, that's not terribly fun, because it just means hours of some repetitive non-difficult task until the bottleneck becomes passable. That's not really difficulty, it's just game-lengthening grind. Also, if the system is simple enough that there's a fairly obvious optimal thing for each character to be doing each moment, then that's not really difficult, it's just random. If the proper response is replanning, experimenting with your approach to prevent whatever killed you last time, then you've potentially got interesting difficulty.

(entering tangential rant)

Honestly, I'm starting to think that the entire mechanism of leveling up is sort of bogus. In most games, the xp gain rate is calibrated to make your characters grow at a fairly predictable rate throughout the plot. So... why bother with the mechanism at all? If you want characters to grow in accordance with plot progression, then *do* that, don't do it through the indirect method of experience points.
This goes double for games which scale encounter difficulty in accordance with character level. Grinding for XP has never been *fun*, even if seeing the numbers go up triggers something primal in the reward-seeking part of our brain that makes it feel worthwhile.
 

And yet, as you mention, XP gain and equipment swapping does provide a nice cushion so that there doesn't need to be the One True Difficulty level which makes the sequence suddenly perfect. So, in short, I dunno.
 

I certainly don't like games that are difficult just to be difficult, but, then again, I don't enjoy easy games or cakewalks either. I've actually quit games that are too easy. Why bother playing when I know I'm going to win no matter what? Can you imagine playing a game of baseball knowing that losing was impossible and every time at bat was going to result in a home run?

I'm not part of the "hard-core" club though. I despise insanely difficult games like Ninja Gaiden 2 (took me far too long just to survive the first screen - and I've played and beaten the original trilogy on NES - when it was new).

But I do think something is missing in most current generation games - the satisfaction from a sense of accomplishment. I'm not talking about inane "achievements" either, but actually getting better and knowing it was by skill alone that you beat the game, not because the developer had dialed down the difficulty to insure every player sees the end.

Mega Man 9 opened my eyes to this, and made me feel something I hadn't felt for years playing games. As a veteran of the NES years, it was still very hard for me when I started playing. I died over and over on the first stage, and finally quit in frustration. But then, a few days later I went back during a boring afternoon and just sat down with the determination to finish one stage. I still died a lot, but I finally beat it. So it went with the rest of the game. But a funny thing happened. After 4-5 hours, it stopped being hard. After 8-9 spent on the game, I rarely, if ever, died. The game had become easy. Not because it was, but because I had gotten so much better. The sense of satisfaction from that was greater than any I've felt recently in even great games, by just finishing the story or game.

I know this is a slippery and difficult scale to get right for developers, but I think a mentality that all games should be made easy and then easier again is flawed, and denies players a very tangible benefit and reward.

An old adage should be applied to all good games - "Easy to learn, difficult to master."
 

Actually, I think "ragequit" is a completely appropriate word to use.

Anyway...I seem to recall reading an essay about "flOw", where they said one of the main points was the ability for the player to change the difficulty at any time. So, if someone was finding the game too easy, they could bump the difficulty up a bit and it would be interesting again. (Personally, I don't think flOw pulled this off, but it's a neat idea.)
 

Wow, I think I can agree in a way with every opinion in here. As has been said, difficulty is tough in any game, especially an RPG. But my personal opinion is that games should start challenging (not hard) and semi progressively grow a bit in "challenge". As has been well stated the goal isn't to stomp the player, but to make a situation for the player to overcome (not quit n load).

In either extreme I get frustrated. One game that has really impressed me with seeming hard from the beginning but actually being easier than actually percieved is Persona. The situation always seems real critical in this game, yet each party member is so diverse it is really hard to find a gameover screen (so far I haven't).
 

I had a friend give up on one of the Persona games because of the difficulty - but that was a boss encounter. Those could get pretty hard, especially if you were unprepared in some way. But I thought P4 was pretty well balanced across the board. I saw the blue room game-over screen quite a few times, but I was usually able to revise my strategy and win on the next fight. And P4 was more generous with the save-game opportunities.
 

"People will just give up and not come back, anticipation the frustration they last felt when playing the game."

I've just experienced this some days ago after 'trying' to play Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on PC. There it was not so much the difficulty level but the unfair difficulty resulting from a horribly done Console to PC conversion. The game plays in slow motion most of the time and many situations in the game are outright annoying thanks to that.
I've uninstalled the game now and have 28GB(!) more space free on my harddisk which feels much better than having such a load of data junk on it.
 

I don't like fighting the same battle over and over again. That's no fun at all. So if I get to a boss encounter that I can't handle without reloading multiple times, I'll go elsewhere. And if I can't do that, I'll quit the game.

I quit playing Knights of the Chalice because I couldn't go forward and couldn't go back. There's no way I wanted to reload a much earlier saved game and replay everything (though it was actually fun the first time). And that's in a game where the challenge was most of the fun.

It does depend on the game. In an RPG with a good story and plenty of exploration and discovery (my favorites), I'd MUCH rather the combat be too easy, rather than too hard. Combat is necessary in these games, but not the most important part. In other games, like Knights of the Chalice, there's nothing to the game but combat. So it might be appropriate that they're more challenging (but only challenging enough to be fun, not frustrating).
 

The board ate my long post, so here's the short one: Difficulty is mroe thab just stacking bigger numbers. You can have different situations and different styles of challenges as well as outright tougher ones. Levellng should give new stuff as well as improve old.
 

It's funny this comes up when it does. I recently had a strong urge to dig out Starcraft again, and played through the Terran and Zerg campaigns over the last week or so. A couple of those are pretty hard for someone who's out of practice, but Blizzard did a fantastic job of helping make the difficulty level appropriate.

One thing that really made the difference was the ability to crank down the speed of the game. I'm not a twitch gamer, I like having the opportunity to think. And it turns out that to me, I'm far more frustrated when my difficulties arise from not having time to think or when I just can't react fast enough than when they arise because I made a mistake.

I think part of what made Mr. Vogel's post unsatisfying to me is that he didn't define "difficulty". I'm assuming he means that the battles in the game are difficult to win without proper preparation/ thought/ understanding of mechanics, and that when you lose a battle, you lose the progress you made since the last save. To me that says not that we won't forgive a game being difficult, but that we won't forgive it being frustrating and punishing us. I haven't played any games in the Avernum series in a while, but I wonder whether he would have success in simply allowing the player to keep retrying battles that are lost without reverting to a save, possibly with the option to make tweaks to the party in between?