Fairness in Games (Poll)

[Friday]

So, let's talk about difficulty in games.

Hahahahahaha, just kidding, because that is a rabbit hole that never ends and nobody knows what the fuck they're even talking about and most people still think that an upfront difficulty selection before the player has even moved their guy at all is "correct."

Instead, let's talk about the concept of "fair" because it seems to be the main thing most people hinge their arguments on.

So, let's get some things out of the way. Firstly, there exists a bunch of boss patterns/attacks and stage hazards that are blatantly unfair. This is usually because they are random as fuck and unreactable. I myself am absolutely guilty of having this kind of bullshit all over my EK levels.

What I want to talk about are the cases where a boss or a stage obstacle are set up so that the player is expected to learn how to deal with them through trial and error and pattern recognition such that though at first overwhelmingly complex, it holds true that once mastered, correct input will always result in victory. For ease of terminology going forward, I will confine my discussion of terms to bosses, but all of this can just as easily apply to Ninja Gaiden Stage 6-2 or Sigma Fortress Stage 3 or whatever.

So let's start with everyone's absolute favorite unfair Dark Souls boss to bitch about, IN THE RED CORNER WEARING THE PROSTHETIC ARM AND LITTLE ELSE, MALENIA BLADE OF MIQUELLA, SHE HAS NEVER KNOWN DEFEAT!

Now, even I, as masochistic as I am, do not think Malenia is fair. Because she absolutely is not. Most specifically because of her attack "Waterfowl Dance" which is a "spam the whole fucking screen with unavoidable lightning fast sword strikes" to those who haven't played Elden Ring. I would have to have even larger rocks in my head than I already do to think that that attack is fair and by extension so is Malenia. However, it is technically possible to avoid it perfectly. "Let me Solo Her" is a guy who does just that, and not only does he do just that, he does it over and over while naked and holding +0 swords. He is living proof that correct input equals victory against Malenia.

So, they interviewed him. "How did you get this good at her?" they asked. Inevitably, his reply was "I fought her hundreds and hundreds of times."

This is not a reasonable thing to expect from a typical player. Even a hardcore player like me. And that is why Malenia is unfair.

Now, I personally think it's fine that she's unfair because she's a super hidden option boss that the player only gets access to at the very end of the game. She's supposed to be undefeated in the Lore and nearly impossible for the player to overcome. I am not here to debate whether Malenia is "valid" or "makes the game better or worse by existing." That's a whole other discussion. I only bring her up because she's a recent example and is relevant to what I'm trying to convey.

So, if hundreds of attempts are unfair, then how many attempts is fair?

That's what I'm asking here. and keep in mind that I'm legitimately trying to learn here. I think this community represents a fairly good cross section of the "average player" and thus this is import information for me to have in my life going forward as a game developer.

And despite my example, don't think this is a "dark souls" question. I'm talking in general. Is okay if learning how to fight Quick Man took you a few tries? Ten tries? Twenty? That's what I'm after here.

To wit: assuming a boss can be reliably beaten with correct input, how many attempts do you think is in realm of fair for the player to learn that input? "Hundreds" is out because that is beyond masochistic. Personally, my limit is probably around 30 before I start calling something unfair, but I'm a weirdo.

Note that a lot of bosses are fair but dull and unfun to fight. That's also not what I care about. Just what you consider fairness.

[Mongrel]

This is a tough one for me because pattern-learning challenge-by-rote doesn't have a ton of appeal to me, BUT that doesn't mean I don't play that stuff at all and I do sometimes engage with fixed-mechanic bosses or content such as you describe. BUT AGAIN my reflexes are so bad that the other day a glacier challenged me to a gymnastics competition and when I said no it knocked me to the floor and took my lunch money and then killed me with a mudslide because glaciers are actually really fast now thanks to global warming, damn.

The "First try" question is also very interesting - does this assume that the boss is just cushy, or that the knowledge needed to beat said boss can be obtained within the attention span of a normal person during or just prior to the boss fight itself, without forcing a player to practice pattern recognition by the usual method of repeatedly throwing themselves at a wall until the wall breaks?

[sei]

Orthogonal but relevant concern: if it takes a lot of time between attempts, my patience for a boss requiring many attempts goes down.

5-10 minutes of running through a level to get back to the boss? Fuck you.
20+ minute boss fight with good execution? Fuck you.

[Upthorn]

To me it doesn't boil down to number of attempts required, but like, mechanics.

What makes Malenia unfair, to me, is that she heals every time she hits you, even if you blocked the attack and took no damage. Even if you "dodged" the attack via iframes.

But the fact is: healing on successful attack is a mechanic that the player never has access to, and if the player did would have massive, massive caveats, like only healing 1-5% of damage dealt, rather than heal for 300% of the damage that the attack would do under ideal circumstances.

As implemented, Malenia's self-healing creates a massive, one-sided advantage that drives the execution requirements up to an insane level. The rules that the game has established about how boss-fights work and what damage racing means are broken for this fight.

The other hard rule that I have for "boss fairness" is if they can damage the player during periods where the player cannot damage them. I feel very strongly that enemies should only be invulnerable during a recovery period after being hit, or due to being too far away to interact with at all. If an enemy that you are expected to defeat* can deal damage to you, then to be fair, it must also receive damage from attacks done to it.

I have a pretty high tolerance for extremely difficult bosses so long as I feel like I'm learning from my losses, and they aren't breaking the rules.

* not a scripted encounter where losing isn't punished, or an escape sequence where attacking is clearly the wrong move

[beatbandito]

I was recently pretty vocal about the "filter" on Armored Core 6. I was ready to argue that I don't think it's an issue of fairness, as much as bad design, but I think in a way it is a fairness about what to expect. By the time the next fight at that level comes to you in the game, you're so much better equipped that it isn't capable of reaching the same level of challenge, and the NG+ filter fight will be a breeze too.

There is one NG++ level I would say replicates the challenge even with a top-tier loadout. But all-in-all the game very early sets a requirement for you that just makes the rest of the game very dull in comparison.

edit: just noticed this is a poll too. A boss is only fair if you can consistently beat it on the first try, not necessarily will. But I would not consider a mechanic that can only be read from previous experience with the same fight as fair. Nor any kind of potential move rotation where you know a certain selection not being made by the boss was a big part of the reason for survival.

[Büge]

I feel like accessibility should be a part of the conversation here, too. What an able-bodied person considers "fair" is radically different from someone who might have impaired coordination, motor skills, hearing, vision, etc., to say nothing of cognitive disabilities (memory problems, sensory processing difficulties, etc.). Where does the accommodation of disability fit into a matrix of "fairness"?

[Friday]

Assume any disabled person is able to access sliders and alternative controls (pad controllers that work with feet instead of hands or whatever) in order to make the game be at whatever level they want it to be. At this point, assuming the disabled person has altered the gameplay to whatever level they desired, what would then be the "fair" number of attempts to get through the area/stage/boss?

Of course, we can't answer for any disabled person, unless we are ourselves disabled. And even then it's still gonna be personal preference. It might vary from disabled person to disabled person. To wit, if I lost my arms in an accident, I would still prefer games that were challenging taking my disability into account while another disabled person may prefer Stardew Valley or whatever.

There's a giant can of discussion about game difficulty, and you guys have already brought up several valid and relevant points. Accessibility is absolutely a relevant point and it should be discussed.

Feel free to discuss that or any other difficulty related topic here. I just want data about what people think the "correct" number of attempts for a boss should be, if that number is "it's only okay and fair if I can consistently beat every boss on the first try," that is a valid answer.

sei: assume the save point is directly in front of the boss/area. We are excluding runbacks because they are pretty much considered bad design at this point. Even Elden Ring pretty much got rid of them almost entirely, a few notable exceptions aside. And that's in the Souls genre, a genre notorious for bad runbacks.

Malenia's self-healing

Surprisingly to me, this is often brought up in discussions about Malenia's bullshit over even her "kill you if she does this move" move. I sort of just view it as her having a huge life bar, but it really seems to rankle a lot of people. I think it was implemented to neuter Spirit Summons since she can just leech a tremendous amount of life off of them. Of course, this doesn't prevent people from using Tiche or Mimic Tear +10 anyway to fuck her up. I think a better solution if they wanted to turn off Spirit Summons for the fight would have been to just... turn off Spirit Summons for the fight and remove her healing.

Malenia has a lot of design problems, honestly. I don't mind her nearly as much as most do but it's not like I'm blind to the problems or claiming she's in the top ten Souls fights either.

The "First try" question is also very interesting - does this assume that the boss is just cushy, or that the knowledge needed to beat said boss can be obtained within the attention span of a normal person during or just prior to the boss fight itself, without forcing a player to practice pattern recognition by the usual method of repeatedly throwing themselves at a wall until the wall breaks?

"Cushy" would fall generally into the type of boss I mentioned earlier: fair, but boring and unfun. A boss that poses absolutely no challenge at all is pretty boring, unless it's meant to be a quasi-cutscene for story purposes.

So a boss that was able to be overcome by careful attention to the attacks and their telegraphs on the first try would be an example of a boss that could be beaten without dying but also still be challenging. If you parse your slow reflexes as a "disability" then perhaps you could have a slider that simply makes the game run at a slower and slower speed, allowing old man Mongrel's rusty synapse firing to react in time to telegraphs.

That leads into how I think bosses should be designed: as final exams of areas. Or the whole game, if it's a final boss. You teach the player the skills they need to know leading up to the boss in advance so that when they get there, they don't have to learn a whole new skillset but are instead asked to show that they have learned and adapted the skills the game has taught them thus far.

Egoraptor shows this in his Megaman/X Sequelitis video. The game is really good at first showing you a threat in a controlled, safe area. Then it ramps up the same threat in a new, unsafe area. But you already know how the enemy/attack works so at this point it's on you to execute.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, I would say that puts me in the camp of "can beat it on the first try" with the caveat that the word CONSISTENTLY is maybe not the best word to use. I think it should be plausible for an "average" (if there really is such a thing) player to beat the boss either from learning on the fly via in-game boss-fight cues (not like, QT events - fuck QT events), or as you say, using the "final exam" model. but that doesn't necessarily have to mean that it's LIKELY. The chance is basically the difficulty in this sort of situation.

I really don't think there's a good excuse to be designing bosses which must be learned by rote in CURRENT YEAR, unless you are very specifically catering to an audience who wants exactly that, though even this is usually a product of nostalgia (which, sure, nostalgia is fair game).

For me, it's not just that sections or bosses requiring you to execute a sequence of actions in a precise way are difficult, it's that it's tedious. We don't have to do this any more to make things difficult, and tedium is never a replacement for genuine difficulty which comes organically if a boss has enough tools and capabilities to not just execute a pattern over and over again. I do want to add that requiring a player to precisely mesh their motions with a boss is fair game, but if you can only do so by anticipating a predictive component which can only be learned from memory (i.e. a fixed sequence), that's just lazy design.

I think it says a lot that if you look at online games, the worst designers or the most unethical devs can often be spotted by their reliance on padding content with tedious busywork designed to stretch out a small amount of content over a larger period of time. Usually when you examine these encounters they don't have much real difficulty or many features either. That sort of gets at the core of the problem is that much of gaming is about solving problems which have been presented to you - players like these problems to be solvable without metaphorically having to look at the back of the textbook for answers, which is kind of what dying and restarting over and over is. The game designer has a difficult job in designing compelling problems which engage the player and give them the opportunity to feel clever or skilled without resorting to bullshit ("I can't describe it, but I know it when I see it").

====================

Interestingly I had a fun idea along the way thinking about this. Is there a game that uses a duel-based combat system where you are given X amount of time to choose a response in a fight? What I mean is, say you have a system where your character duels others using complex fencing moves, but not in real-time. As opponents make a move, the fight stops and you are given the chance to pick a counter-move, albeit with a timer, giving the game a sort of card-battle-game-without-cards feel . As your character grows and becomes skilled, not only does their repertoire of moves grow, but you also gain additional time on your timer (within reason) to decide, which represents your character's improved ability to plan and foresee moves in the middle of fast-paced combat. Has any game ever done that sort of First-person-meets-card-game-meets-Fallout's-combat-pause-system?

[Brantly B.]

Here's a question, though: Is fairness overrated?

If you ask me, the low bar for "fair" on a boss is: It can't be rendered unwinnable due to bad RNG rolls, which has been covered, and it doesn't rely on actions or concepts that would be totally outside the player's verb set at that point, which has also more or less been covered.

By those metrics, I have never designed a "fair" boss in my life. That's granted, I accept it.

Quantifying fairness in number of attempts is kind of futile, because even if you set a perfect savestate at the beginning of the fight, not every attempt is going to be equal. Would you rather have to fight Air Man a hundred times, or fight Ghaleon ten times?

Now, bosses break these rules all three time, usually more because the number of "good" bosses is quite small compared to the number of forgettable-to-terrible bosses. More specifically, pure RPGs will break the RNG rule because gambling is just inherent to the game you're playing, and "tutorial" bosses obviously break the existing verbage rule although they probably shouldn't because tutorial bosses are mostly just very aggravating.

The main example of a good "fair" boss in my mind right now is the final boss of the original Splatoon, who is challenging enough for a standard-difficulty Nintendo final boss, but noticeably uses all the concepts you've learned throughout the single player campaign, no more and no less (okay well the Dead Man's Volley mechanic is kinda new at that point but if you can't DMV a Nintendo final boss then you're kinda fucked). The boss *himself* ramps up in the amount of shit he pulls gradually throughout the fight, so by the time he's pulling his final combination punch/laser/summon spam on a platform two tiles wide, you're still on equal footing to deal with it. Tasty finish.

But now let's talk about a totally unfair boss. Let's talk about Gannon.

That's two-N Gannon, meaning the guy at the end of The Hyrule Fantasy: Zelda no Densetsu. You know, the invisible pig.

The first time you meet this guy, which inevitably is when you're five years old playing on your sister's NES that she forgot she ever had, and you first manage to drag your obnoxiously beeping carcass through the ordeal of Spectacle Rock the first time, you're treated to a brief glimpse of the Prince of Darkness himself and then... nothing. You don't know where he is, and you don't know how to beat him. Nothing in the game whatsoever has prepared you for this - you've never fought an invisible enemy before - and as far as you can ever tell his movements are unpredictable and random (which they are very much not but there's no reasonable way to tell that from the visual information you're given). All you can do is flail around randomly with your sword, which sometimes seems to work until it suddenly doesn't. If you haven't pieced together the secret to the final blow then you are doomed to lose this battle.

Is this fair, in the context of a normal player without about 40 years of collected information at their fingertips? No, it's specifically unfair. Is that a problem?

Well, no. Because it's Gannon, and because he's the perfect endcap of the whole adventure - you, alone, deep in the bowels of an extraordinarily hostile environment, confronted by an ultimate enemy who's both nowhere and everywhere, who must be overcome by your courage and wit in order to finally achieve your goal. Gannon is, as they say, real mean and that's the point, because when you finally do win you will feel like you managed to overcome odds that were truly stacked against you - even if later in life, with all the powers of retrospect in hand, you're going to blow past the guy in like 15 seconds.

At that same point in life you might spend at least 20 hours planning and grinding up a specialized party to beat just one boss, and repeatedly dying and refining your strategy against said boss, and not think at all that it was a waste of time because said boss is the final superboss of an Etrian Odyssey game and this shit is exactly what you signed up for.

So, is it really that bad for a boss to be unfair? I'd say not by itself, but depending on context it may contribute to what is actually bad for any boss or any challenge to be, which is not worth it.

[Niku]

i will dash myself upon the rocks until the ocean is replaced with my blood

[Niku]

but only if like, it feels good to play

[nosimpleway]

It took me like 12 tries to beat Undyne the Undying, and I think 15 to beat Sans.

I probably would not have bothered if it were not for my attempts to be reasonably comprehensive when doing a Let's Play.

It helps that their patterns are exactly the same every time, if it was RNG bullshit I would not have given them that much time and effort before calling it off.

[Upthorn]

I feel like random attack patterns can be okay as long as they aren't overly punishing.
It's fine for Zelda bosses that do Zelda level damage to your fully maxed out 20 hearts to be pretty damn random.
Not so much for Dark Souls bosses where face-tanking one or two combos is deadly.

[Caithness]

I've gone as high as the 150-death range on some Mario Maker courses before beating them, perhaps more, it's hard to say.

I've also given up on Order of Ecclesia forever after 2 or 3 attempts at the crab boss. It really depends on if I'm having fun, which in turn can depend on my mood at the moment, how hungry/tired/hot I am, etc.

[Friday]

OoE's Crab is a crucible, and we are the sinners. One does not achieve victory over the Crab, we are merely purified, so that we can, going forward, endure the pain that is to come. Those who fall to the Crab do not fail, but instead retain their hearts. The rest of us, hearts killed, no longer feel anything other than the eternal black fire.

[Friday]

Which is to say, what the fuck, why would you put the hardest boss in like all of Castlevania games like ten minutes in I don't even know how to move my character yet

[Friday]

Imagine you're playing Elden Ring and Malenia just shows up as the tutorial boss

walks in, gives you a nod "sup, I'm Malenia, and I ain't ever been beat"

and you return the nod and you're like "wait how do you roll, which button is run"

and she does waterfowl dance and the game disc ejects from your playstation and flies across the room and decapitates you

[nosimpleway]

shyaaaaawwwwwwww

[Niku]

my playthrough of lies of p this week has only further vindicated my position