Card Hunter Analysis, or: Talking about difficulty in games

(This entry was written for SNHU's GAM-205 class in the Fall 2017 semester.)

    For this week, we were supposed to do a deep analysis of the free with paid content game Card Hunter. Unfortunately, we wound up having some problems with the reading. As such, I won't be able to do as deep of an analysis as I was supposed to do. However, when we were talking about our experiences in the game, a discussion came up about difficulty in games.

Real, otherwise, and involving the cruel fiend known as the RNG.

    For those who don't know, Card Hunter is a turn-based tactical game based off D&D where your party uses cards to battle monsters, with the cards you have based off of your equipment, class, and race. Going to the discussion, the game starts with a pre-made mid-to-late game party to give you a taste of how a stronger party will function as you fight some mooks and an acid-breathing dragon (although I thought black dragons breathed acid, not green.) After that, you start with a first level party that eventually consists of a fighter, a wizard, and a cleric. One of the students in my discussion group felt that the enemies were too powerful and able to move more than he was, leading him to rage quit the game after a while. The other student in my group said that the difficulty felt fair to him. After playing through the game a few hours, I feel like I have to side with the second student. I'll try to explain why.

    How combat works in this game is that each member of your party each has a hand of cards, and each group of enemies (such as two troglodyte scuttlers or one goblin shaman) has their own hand. The game alternates between you and Gary, the DM, playing a card from one of the character/group's hands until both sides pass, which starts a new round and gives more cards. One thing the first student complained about is how multiple enemies can move in a single turn. When a group of enemies uses a movement card, each enemy in that group moves using the rules on the card, that is true. However, if the group has more than one enemy, each enemy in that group can only attack once. Your party, meanwhile, can use as many attacks as they have in their hand. So the game felt pretty balanced to me. The only time so far I lost a party member (your party heals fully in between battles, by the way) was when I misjudged how I should move my fighter when fighting a beefy enemy capable of doing double digit damage at a point when 11 damage is enough to one shot my elf wizard and put my fighter in danger. It didn't feel like it was the game's fault that I lost a party member.

    So, let's talk about Fake Difficulty. It's basically when a game is harder than it should be. It generally falls into five categories: bad technical aspects (like a sudden camera change mid-jump), factors outside of a player's control (such as escort missions or an over reliance on luck for victory), the game denying you crucial information (such as a text parser in a text-based adventure not understanding what you're typing), the game punishing you for decisions long before the player could understand what they were doing, or requiring or rewarding counter-intuitive or irrelevant behavior or skill (such as making tequila by dropping a worm into a bottle of sewage water, or turning a bottle of tap water green by putting saffron in it). Fake Difficulty isn't necessarily bad (remember the Tomb of Horrors?), but it can really cause problems if used improperly.

A fitting rendition of anyone who plays Limbo of the Lost.

    I can think of three examples of Fake Difficulty off of the top of my head that would be good at explaining this concept used poorly. The first two come from the Atlus RPG Etrian Odyssey Untold II, the remake of Etrian Odyssey II. Both of these appear in the post-final-boss area, although one of these appears in the original, as well. In the 6th "world", the 30th floor has a rare encounter known as a Dinogator (Muckdile in the original version). It is obscenely powerful with an attack that hits everyone in a party of five for damage that can one-shot weaker party members from full health, a party wide attack that basically disables everyone, and (remake only) an attack that hits 10 times for slightly more damage than the first attack. The main kicker that I recall is that it is the sole enemy in the entire (original) game, true final bonus boss included, who is immune to stuns. It lost this distinction in the remake, but given that every enemy/boss in the original is vulnerable to the stun condition, it would be fair to assume that stunning it would be your only saving grace.

*sound of a DS/computer being thrown through a window*

    Fake Difficulty example #2 comes from the true final bonus boss of the remake, the Ur-Devil. The original true final bonus boss of the original game, the Ur-Child, is already pretty bad, but Ur-Devil takes everything wrong with Child and runs with it. It requires a very specific strategy and very careful management of your party's Force skills (basically a Limit Break), and if you don't do the exact strategy or get unlucky, you're screwed. Beating Devil requires specific knowledge before hand that is never given in game, turning this into a Guide Dang It with a hefty dose of trial-and error.

Pictured: A giant middle finger, courtesy of Atlus.

    The last example I have today relies on the game itself lying to the player. This example comes from...

Hello, disappointment, my old friend...

    I've stopped playing this game due to highly flawed writing among other things, but this example comes from the Summer event, the last event I participated in before quitting. The final boss of the hardest stage in that event, a Summer-themed version of Cao Cao, has an instant death attack (hitting every party member like four times for hundreds of thousands of HP) he uses if you take too long when he's on his first and third health bar. The problem is that when the game warns you of the attack and when it's used, it's called a multi-hit combo. Earlier in the stage, a mook enemy uses a charge followed by an actual combo (launching several attacks aimed at random party members). It has the exact same description as Cao Cao's instant death attack. Seriously. First time you see it, you'll think "Okay, just have to heal up and tank the damage." and then your party gets transformed into a party-shaped stain on the floor. Yes, I'm still bitter over the inconsistent writing.

        Difficulty in games is somewhat of an issue of perception. There's always the chance that a game like Card Hunter is too hard due to sub-par tactics or a less than optimal equipment loadout, but it can be hard to tell due to everyone having a different definition of difficulty. Sometimes, the high difficulty can even be considered fair if done in a proper manner. My experience with Nethack could be described with a huge pile of wizard corpses, but I don't think the game's difficulty is unfair, and neither is Card Hunter.

That metaphorical corpse pile did help me find Waldo, though.