[Oddey]

It's an interesting topic.

On the one hand, easy games can give a great sense of flow, as well as make you feel unbelievably cool. This is a good thing, because it's often crucial to have that flow and feeling of power. Furthermore, easy games can be played by anyone, not just people who are willing to clench their teeth together and bear through it.

Of course, easy games also have the problem of simply being boring to play. After all, pressing a button to win isn't much involvement with an interactive medium. There's also the problem that if you make the game too easy, the powerful feeling instead makes you feel like your actions are meaningless in the game.

Hard games on the other hand are not approachable by everyone. After all, not everyone wants to spend hours figuring out various tricks and techniques for how to succeed at a game. It's also easy to lose interest in a hard game, because grinding away like that only to be met with constant failure isn't always alluring.

But on the flip-side, you beat a hard game and you feel like you're on fire. And sometimes a game has to be hard to serve the story. If it wasn't hard, it wouldn't feel like you'd accomplished much, so the power feeling and control is even bigger.

I'm not sure what difficulty should be based on, but I think it depends on the story you want to tell. Take for example, Assassin's Creed 2, or indeed most of them but the first. They're not exactly difficult. Most of the enemies are easy to kill with simple counter-attacks, and stealth isn't necessary. You also get a preposterously large amount of money to get equipment that isn't even that useful. As I said, this easiness does make the game flow well, and you do feel like a real assassin. But if you notice how easy it is, then you don't feel anywhere near as powerful, and the game ceases to be as meaningful. I still enjoy the games, but I feel that if the difficulty was a tiny bit more towards the difficult side, it might have been a better game. I think that difficulty should depend on the story you're trying to tell, the atmosphere you're trying to provide.

For example, if you take something like Abe's Oddysee, that game is undoubtedly difficult, at least the first time you go through it. But this serves the story, in that you are the skinny guy with no guns or muscle to plow through the enemies and everything wants to either kill or eat you. In effect, it uses difficulty to emphasize the message. But the same difficulty also causes problems, like potentially limiting the audience who will go through the entire thing.

Of course, you could argue that Assassin's Creed's story is that of a master assassin, and thus you aren't meant to have a hard time, being so good at what you do. But personally, I feel that even as a master assassin, the suspension of disbelief as Ezio or Connor mows down about twenty guards in a single fight, isn't spotted sitting on a bench even though he was running from guards moments before, can blend seamlessly into a crowd of courtesans or can make himself completely unknown to authorities by removing a poster or two is stretched just a bit thin. If it seemed a little bit harder for them to do it, it might have been a little less disturbing to my experience of the game.