Is it bad game design to make a game difficult enough that many people might give up?

Is it bad game design to make a game difficult enough that many people might give up?

It just shows that you're weak as shit.

Not if the game is explicitly designed to be difficult and the difficulty doesn't come from bad controls or poorly thought out levels

high difficulty games need to be interesting for people to actually care to keep trying. I typed interesting since someone could get triggered by the word fun

TRIGGER WARNING

You can use the word fun, just put a trigger warning.

how about pomegranates

That bitch is cheeky.

>HMMHMHMHMHMHMHMHMHHM

Literally nothing wrong with these. I don't see why these trigger people. It's not like they have holes. Those look nothing like holes. Not at all. It's like saying someone would get triggered by looking inside a cup of bubble tea.

Pretty much.

If the difficulty is "Get better at the game, have better chances" then that's fine, like Spelunky.

If the difficulty is "You didn't know there was a trap here, and there was one, so fuck you, now you know" then it's not.

only works in very arcadey games where you don't really have any progression other than that of your own skill at the game

every other instance (speak: every decent game) should be forgiving enough while still contain challenge

beating your head against the wall is not a good game in most cases, unless you're playing depression quest or something

If that's what you're trying to achieve, sure.

it looks like blood soaked frog spawn
i dunno it's pretty creepy to me

They're just little bubbles of juice

Depends on if you're trying for it to be at that skill level. Dark Souls is meant to be hard so that's acceptable.

...that look like they have parasites growing inside them

I don't think a game where you can summon people to make walking off a cliff the most of your worries qualifies as hard.

Shit's tasty as fuck.

That's something that has always been kind of strange regarding Dark Souls.

It is understood to be a hard game, but if your only purpose when playing it was actually just completing it, it's actually really easy to do, summoning people all the time for every fight makes the game almost trivial.

When you develop a game, or any product for that matter, you need to know who your audience is.
Games like Spacechem or Dustforce are hard because they were made to pander to certain groups, they admit and are proud of how hard they are so much they have mechanics meant for players to help and/or compete with each other.
A difficult game is only a failure if the designer was trying to create an accesible title for casual audiences.
All this doesn't mean a hard game can't have mass appeal. With the correct marketing and a couple tweaks it can, see: Dark Souls.

delete this

...

I'm so stoked for La-Mulana 2 and all the asshurt the first week brings.

You're a homosexual.

It was hard before everyone knew everything about it.

Surprisingly, if you walked into a Souls game without playing one before, it was hard.

>I'm so stoked
You talk like a Canadian.

In 10 days they are showing the (nearly) data complete game off at TGS (according to the latest kickstarter post at least). I was going to wait until closer to the release date, but I couldn't help myself and I started my third replay of the original game. I'm way too hype for this game that I'm probably going to get stuck on and then get frustrated with almost instantly.

>Summoning
What a fag, pic semi-related.

Who's the one on the bottomleft between Rhea and Ciaran?

I agree that summoning is for big fags, but you just can't say a game is hard if a resource that makes it easy is readily available.

Anastacia.

It's not. It requires going human and then finding a sign, while risking losing valuable humanity and making yourself open to invasion at any time.

To be fair the odds of getting invaded aren't all that high unless you are in a hotspot and most bosfights have NPCs you can always summon.
Not counting the possibility that an invaded player won't be alone.

No.

It's a bad business decision if you create a game that few people will want to buy due to the sheer difficulty, but it's not bad game design at all.

You have to remember that casuals outnumber us a hundred to one, and they're where most sales are gonna be coming from. That's why AAA titles are always such safe, boring trash.