So, what are your thoughts on "trial and error" and difficulty in Sonic games?

[Shiny Gems]

Title says it all. I made this thread because I noticed that some here were complaining about the difficulty spike in Sonic Frontiers' third update, or more precisely, the trial and error that may have come with it. Now I realize there were things about the difficulty that were unfair, but the third update is not just what I am talking about. Trial and error was also complained about in Sonic Unleashed. While stages like Eggmanland may have had differences from Frontiers' third update, there were also most of the optional, yet very hard DLC stages that could be downloaded for the game. I remember the complaining about such stages' trial and error almost all too well, honestly. My point is that this is not the first time difficulty as well as trial and error in a Sonic game.

I think there are plenty within the fanbase who are at least not patient with trial and error as well as difficulty. I mean, having the patience for it can still lead to the player not having any fun in the game, but I do think it is a factor, nonetheless. I also think having patience with these kinds of things can make games fun and make players better. This is probably rich coming from me, as I have been described as "one of the most impatient people around", but I do have the patience and ability to have fun with trial and error in Sonic games. Still, I do not know if this has been said before other than by myself, but as I always say, "Every storm someone rides has its own reward". The storm in question does not have to be an actual storm, but a metaphor for other things like playing games or working very hard at work. I do not think some people in the Sonic fans like going through that. I mean, more power to them, but there is so much skill to build when things are easier. While doing things easier can still be better to some, I think more fun and much more can be attained with trial and error, and I personally think while Sonic Frontiers' trial and error was not perfect, it could actually make future Sonic games fun with improvements.

So, what do you think of what I said? More importantly, what do you think of trial and error as well as difficulty in Sonic games, and if you don't mind it or want it, how do you think it should be handled in such games?

[Ghelatlishol]

Trial and error were pretty much the way to go for early video games, and Sonic was no exception.

I mean, the first arcade games were literally learn as you go, sink or swim, etc. Think of Pac-Man. You keep going until you get better.

I think that's why they introduced Continues in Sonic, so you at least had a chance to finish the game (or try to.) Personally, I'd like to see a return to having to start the game all over again if you fail. You WILL get better.

[ZinogreVolt]

Trial and error is just the natural result of a game's skill curve. Sonic games benefit from it especially because they heavily depend on players getting better as a way of informing gameplay, either through intrinsic means like personal Score Attacks in the Classics or through means like Rankings and Time Attacks. It's fine so long as the game feels like it introduces challenge within reasonable windows (which will vary from person to person) and feels decently fair and consistent. The degree to which the game punishes the player also plays a part in informing that. But again, how fun and/or frustrating someone finds trial and error to be is pretty much a purely subjective matter. I love the high difficulty and punishing nature of the Towers in Final Horizons, but other people don't. Them's the breaks.

[JezMM]

For me it's the setbacks that cause the frustration much more than the trial and error itself.  The amount you're expected to memorise via each "trial" gets ridiculous when they're about 3-4 minutes long, and the further in you get, the more stressful "trialling" things becomes when you can't see the path forward.  Sometimes the "trial" in question is just the game going "THINK FAST" and you just either do or you don't.  Sometimes the "trial" is working out exactly how far to precisely jump to land on the platform because the depth perception the camera angle provides just isn't clear.

Stuff like that is just not enjoyable to take multiple attempts on when the penalty is playing another 2-3 minutes of stuff you've already done to try one more time - over and over again.  In fact it's a surefire way to make the very act of playing your game feel like a punishment rather than the joy it should be.

So yeah, when it comes to trial and error, the designers should strive for unity between challenge, reward and punishment.  Not all challenges are equal, so the punishments for failure shouldn't be equal either, and should be carefully considered alongside the design of each challenge in order to maintain player motivation.

Nothing stops master players from performing that perfect run for their own intrinsic reward of simply performing the feat, but antagonistic game design can stop novice players from having fun at all.

[Shiny Gems]

One other thing; I said this on a status update, but I want to post something about difficult things/trial and error being optional and checkpoints in areas.

So, how far does the "optional" thing go?

I mean, while it is nice to have options not to do thing in games, and while the update can be considered unfair in some ways, I do think video games are supposed to reflect on life, including that life is unfair. I know it would suck that the hardest things are mandatory, and like I said, Sonic Frontiers' update's difficulty can be unfair, but it does still have potential to improve a player's skill, nonetheless. Plus, while it is relatively subjective, it can be rewarding in ways other than making the player's skill better, such as giving the sense of achieving things. Like climbing a mountain or winning a race, it can give the player a sense of achievement, aside from fun.

With that, video games reflect that life is not easy in many ways. In fact, if hard parts of any game (not just Sonic Frontiers' update) were not mandatory, how could one learn from it and get better? Video games are not supposed to always be forgiving, in fact, too much forgiveness and you won't be ready for the harder things in the future. The fact that the DLC stages of Sonic Unleashed are optional, while it can be valid, makes me honestly think that some people would avoid doing hard things altogether and with that, don't want to do them despite their benefits; not that it is a bad thing to decide that; but I think preferring the harder things in video games to be optional would just make it so a player never has to get better or change.

So I do not think anything that is hard, has trial and error, or memorization being optional hold that much merit in that regard., let alone much of a good reason.

Also, for the checkpoints, I do remember there are "marathon" levels where there are no checkpoints and test your skill. Now, for an example, take Super Mario 3D World. One of its last levels, if not, THE last level, named Champion's Road. It was a lengthy level with absolutely no checkpoints and no power-ups. Not that it was as hard as Sonic Frontiers' third update, or hard in any way, shape or form, even, but while I have not played it, I do remember that it comes from a great Mario game, and maybe the level itself can be fun.

Sure, things like the towers in Sonic Frontiers' third update could have been better, BUT making it through levels without checkpoints does exist in other games.

I mean, it is all subjective, but I do not think it is always necessary to make trial and error/hard difficulty optional or have checkpoints. Not always. Maybe with the towers, it could have worked, though. Won't deny that.

[ZinogreVolt]

I think in the case of the Final Horizon Towers, not having checkpoints is absolutely fair because it's easy to recover from a stumble and land on something midway up the tower. Given that Frontiers is Frontiers, errors will possibly occur to keep that from being possible and the player will stumble to the bottom through no fault of their own, but such an interaction would be the fault of poor engineering and programming, not the inherent game design. When Frontiers is working as intended, you can break a stagger animation with a parry or dodge and move yourself to a nearby platform while falling, which makes messing up less punishing. If anything, I find that solution to be more interesting than regular checkpoints because it means the player has to think on the fly and read the level design in order to lessen the severity of their punishment for messing up.

Likewise I think the new Cyberspace stages are also fine because they're already short and meant to be played multiple times anyway. The new gimmicks they introduce like the racing ghost and time bomb are also meant to compound the stress of completing them, so in a sense I think adding checkpoints to them would defeat the purpose. You could say that that's not fun and I won't argue against that, but it wasn't done without reason either. The bigger issue is that Frontiers does a piss poor job at really training players for these moments because the non-Final Horizon content, barring the Koco Challenges added in Update 2, are baby easy. 

[Shiny Gems]

I wish to add something...if Super Mario 3D World was not a good example, here are some other levels in games where you had to do things without checkpoints, some being way worse than the towers or even the boss rush trial.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CheckPointStarvation

Lots of games do this, and there are some examples that are more terrible than the towers out there, like the levels of the first two Legend of Spyro games and a case in one of the Metroid Prime games. With all that said, it is not like the towers were the worst thing, considering that if you are able to, you can land on one of the platforms below before you hit the ground, and continue from there as if it were a checkpoint. Nothing wrong with that, is there?

Not to mention, while Sonic Unleashed's Eggmanland did technically have checkpoints, there were Chili Dog missions in Eggmanland where you had to start over if you died even one time, and you had to go through the entirety of the level to get a single chili dog. So there is that. As optional as it was, it was still required to get all trophies and 100 percent the game, and you may have had to do it three times total, while climbing the towers only was necessary to do once for each tower. So with that, I think the Eggmanland level could be as bad as the towers and boss rush trial if we count the missions, if not, worse.

I would also like to point out something in regards to the classics; there were sections in the classics, mainly some bosses and the final boss of each of the classics (with the final boss fight from Sonic and Knuckles, which is part of Sonic 3, begin counted, the one before the Doomsday if you have all the Emeralds) where you had to fight such bosses without any rings, and if you die, you had to start over. Sure, they were short, and they were probably not hard as the towers or even the boss rush trial, but I can't imagine those classic final bosses being easy and not frustrating to first timers of the series, especially the final boss level of Sonic 2.

And also, when beating such bosses, beating such bosses without rings would help the player build up their skill, meaning you would get better, and that is not even something that would be necessary for the towers at least since you had to climb each once.

[Rabid-Coot]

16 minutes ago, Spooky Gems said:

I would also like to point out something in regards to the classics; there were sections in the classics, mainly some bosses and the final boss of each of the classics (with the final boss fight from Sonic and Knuckles, which is part of Sonic 3, begin counted, the one before the Doomsday if you have all the Emeralds) where you had to fight such bosses without any rings, and if you die, you had to start over. Sure, they were short, and they were probably not hard as the towers or even the boss rush trial, but I can't imagine those classic final bosses being easy and not frustrating to first timers of the series, especially the final boss level of Sonic 2

Small correction  on the S3K boss you can have rings and a shield if you're going in from the first boss but if you die you then get nothing.

[Shiny Gems]

1 minute ago, Rabid-Coot said:

Small correction  on the S3K boss you can have rings and a shield if you're going in from the first boss but if you die you then get nothing.

Thanks for the correction. Much appreciated.

[Palas]

5 hours ago, Spooky Gems said:

I would also like to point out something in regards to the classics; there were sections in the classics, mainly some bosses and the final boss of each of the classics (with the final boss fight from Sonic and Knuckles, which is part of Sonic 3, begin counted, the one before the Doomsday if you have all the Emeralds) where you had to fight such bosses without any rings, and if you die, you had to start over. Sure, they were short, and they were probably not hard as the towers or even the boss rush trial, but I can't imagine those classic final bosses being easy and not frustrating to first timers of the series, especially the final boss level of Sonic 2.

This is a non-issue, mostly, and absolutely unrelated to the concept of "trial and error" as a complaint. The life system has always made it so that the final boss wasn't a discrete challenge: they're the pinnacle of your playthrough and the amount of chances you get (lives) is entirely dependent on how well you did on every other challenge before. So there's a sense of congruity that makes these bosses part of a larger challense structure that encompasses the whole game. Of course it's frustrating to lose all the lives you've gathered and get a game over nevertheless, but it doesn't mean the journey, in itself, wasn't fun and even narratively satisfying. Hard as the Sonic 2 final boss may be, you can't call that trial and error unless you're willing to give that name to any and all challenges in any given game. Sure, you have to execute at least twelve jumps perfectly (and kill Silver Sonic beforehand) is a long chain to sustain, but the game doesn't put you in a do-or-die micro situation. You can stall the fight more or less indefinitely, and retries are earned throughout the game, so the more skilled you are, the more prepared you feel and the process by which you'll prepare yourself will, in fact, increase your chances of beating it in the first place. This kind of resource management is inherited from arcade games, and isn't as cruel as it's made out t be.

Trial and error as a perceived problem arises from the notion that a certain challenge is framed in a way that completely disregards everything you've done before and its repetition doesn't add anything to your experience. No matter how lenient the punishment for failure is, the fact that you can't progress before you succeed and there isn't a clear way to go through, or it seems arbitrary, or the skill you've built so far doesn't matter in the face of the obstacle is irrelevant. A well-balanced life system is actually a good antidote against this feeling and infinite lives, unintuitively, enhance this feeling. This was said to be a problem in Frontiers' final update because you have to use an ability you basically never had to use before, so the challenges become discrete, encapsulated in that one moment. QTEs are also almost necessarily conducive to this notion, because they change every time you go through it no matter how skilled you got at your reaction times.

Which is why complaints about memorization are misplaced, as if it was some sort of weird inherent flaw of game design. It isn't. Why you get to memorize is what matters, and positive reinforcement as the only mechanism of resource management tends to be more frustrating, not less, in this department.

[Shiny Gems]

I did not say that the classics, specifically the final bosses, were that much of trial and error, did I not? All I was saying was that it was hard. Maybe not Sonic Frontiers update 3 hard, but it did suffer from Checkpoint Starvation, which is in a page I linked to. That said, trial and error or not, I thought I'd bring up the difficulty of those final bosses since they were in the page. The final bosses may be irrelevant to the trial and error thing, but I do not think they are friendly to first timers.

But while I understand the complaints, and do think they even exist, I don't think that the towers at least are hard. The boss rush trial is, of course,, another story, even on the difficulty I played it in, but I do think getting better and improving one's skills are something that can make things fun, though it does depend on the person, of course. Now, that hardly excuses how hard things might have been for players in the update, so it is necessary to point out, to Sonic Team, what to do and what not to do. There is always room for improvement, and I don't necessary mean player skill.

[Palas]

14 hours ago, Spooky Gems said:

I did not say that the classics, specifically the final bosses, were that much of trial and error, did I not? All I was saying was that it was hard. Maybe not Sonic Frontiers update 3 hard, but it did suffer from Checkpoint Starvation, which is in a page I linked to. That said, trial and error or not, I thought I'd bring up the difficulty of those final bosses since they were in the page. The final bosses may be irrelevant to the trial and error thing, but I do not think they are friendly to first timers.

But while I understand the complaints, and do think they even exist, I don't think that the towers at least are hard. The boss rush trial is, of course,, another story, even on the difficulty I played it in, but I do think getting better and improving one's skills are something that can make things fun, though it does depend on the person, of course. Now, that hardly excuses how hard things might have been for players in the update, so it is necessary to point out, to Sonic Team, what to do and what not to do. There is always room for improvement, and I don't necessary mean player skill.

Sorry, I misunderstood your post. Also, sure-- there's always room to improve. But otherwise I agree with @ZinogreVoltin that the root cause of the perceived problem is that the game asks for specific moves, but has a hard time conveying that -- more than a problem of checkpoint starvation or required precision.

(Side thought: In a way, you could say Naka's one-action-button-philosophy always prevented that, too. You'll always be able to overcome any challenge ever by jumping or rolling, so there's no possible problem of "teaching" the player how to do something. Any trick can be done with the simplest tools possible. Not that I'm advocating for it to come back, of course, but the notion that you're the one responsible for figuring things out and the game will never have to "teach" you anything helps, too.)

[Shiny Gems]

That is okay. Still, even  if you misunderstood my post, I could have made things more clear.

Of course, building up skill can only do so much in terms of making someone like a game better, especially in regards to the third update of Sonic Frontiers.

But yeah, if I am understanding it correctly (what ZinogreVolt said), I can see that asking for specific moves is not really fun. I didn't mind it, but yeah, that is not going to be a plus for some people, is it not? It must have been an issue for the boss rush trial, again, if I understood correctly.

If not, feel free to explain it more to me.

[Technically Inept]

Difficulty is what you’re being asked to do.

Punishment is the consequences of failing to do that thing.

Trial and error is fine in my opinion as long as

- The game is actually fun to begin with. (Probably the biggest one)

- You aren’t punished too hard for messing up due to trial and error based design. (Such as being set back really far)

- You are able to get back into the gameplay quickly after a mess up (preferably instantly)

- There are other skills being tested besides “reflexes”, (quotes around that because there is no way people can react to some of these things) and route memorization, like precision, timing, action chaining, etc.

- You actually get to see yourself improving at a decent rate as you repeat attempts. Hitting a brick wall is not fun in any game.

[Technically Inept]

I just realized I zeroed in three words of the title and not the actual question in it’s entirety.

My answer to the trial and error thing is “it’s not very good in Sonic.”

My answer to the difficulty in Sonic games part is, “What difficulty in Sonic games?”