by icycalm » 25 Sep 2014 15:56
Some thoughts about this game and why I think we should turn the difficulty down to Normal.
This game (or at least its first level, which I have seen) is an astonishingly successful simulator of the bank robbery scene in Heat. If you ever wanted to see what it would feel like to be involved in something like that, this is the closest you can get without buying some actual guns. However, the devs done fucked up real good the way the difficulty works. How did they fuck up? They fucked up in two ways:
1. The grinding mechanics
and
2. The difficulty scaling mechanics
The grinding mechanic basically forces you to start off at the highest difficulty (Overkill), which we did, because if you start at a lower one you will inevitably level up your character quite easily, so not only will the levels be easier for you to beat, but if you later try to turn the difficulty up, those higher difficulties will no longer be that difficult because you'll be leveled up. So if you start low and progressively crank it up (as everyone else playing the game seems to be doing) all you'll be doing is keeping the difficulty curve about flat throughout the entire game. This is the essence of what the grinding system does to this game, and to games generally.
So you wanna go for the highest difficulty right away, to make sure that things get harder with each succeeding level -- or at any rate that they don't get easier -- even as your characters level up. Which is where problem number 2 rears its ugly head.
The higher difficulties seem to work by simply throwing more cops at you, and more tanky cops. But this totally breaks the immersion factor of the game -- the "wow I am in the bank robbery scene from Heat" feeling -- which as I explained is the selling point of the game and why you should be playing it. I mean when cops are basically falling over each other to jump in front of your gun as if you are playing Operation Wolf, the entire scene breaks down. These aren't cops: these are selfless patriots sacrificing their lives for the continuing existence of their nation. It's simply impossible for me to maintain suspension of disbelief when this shit is happening. It's right in my face every second of the game, almost from the get-go, and it's impossible to ignore and enjoy the experience. So Overkill difficulty is unplayable for me. Hard is better, but not by a huge amount. So I think we should try Normal.
I am not saying it because I am frustrated with the difficulty: we play each checkpoint in L4D/Expert for several hours before we get to clear it, so I can handle frustration just fine. Besides, this shit 'aint frustrating when, every time you lose, your characters have leveled up a bit, and the next attempt will therefore be a little easier. In L4D the next attempt will be exactly as hard as the previous one, and the only way to beat it is to improve. You improve too in Payday, but it's hard to say exactly by how much when your characters are improving too at the same time, and by varying amounts no less. It also makes you lazier in the actual game, because you know that, no matter how shitty you do in this attempt, you'll do better in the next one anyway. I could even see some people grinding so much and playing so lazily that even though they end up unlocking everything and clearing everything in all the difficulties, they'll be playing almost the exact same way at the end of the game as they played in their very first attempt at the first level (and, again, it seems that this is exactly how most people play the game).
So basically, my complaint, even though it centers on the difficulty level, is aesthetic, not mechanical (or, more precisely, it is in how the mechanics have been used to express the aesthetics, which should once more show you that the "geamlay" is not something separate from the "graphix"). Consider how this works in Killing Floor. Killing Floor has basically the exact same setup as Payday: they are both campaign- and grinding-based co-op shooters. The only difference is that the enemies in Killing Floor are mindless zombies, so it's perfectly fine when you crank up the difficulty and you get bigger and bigger hordes of them throwing themselves at you from every direction because, hey, they are zombies after all and that's what zombies do.
But cops don't act like zombies, dear Payday developers, and you are undermining all the other awesome behaviors you have programmed for them when you make them act like that because you couldn't be arsed to hire a decent AI expert to make them more capable at higher difficulties.
So my solution to this debacle is to clear all the levels one by one on Normal, and then move on to the sequel, without touching the higher difficulties. That is how I see, right now, the best way to enjoy the game.
And P.S., whoever is playing this game alone or with strangers is mindlessly grinding from beginning to end and getting almost no enjoyment out of it, fyi (and most people seem to play this way). Or they get a kind of zombie-like enjoyment, which is fitting, in a way, considering what I just explained about the game.
P.P.S. This, by the way, is almost a review of the game, but I have a lot more to say too, so I will say it in the full review when I have finished it. It's a borderline 4/5 so far -- borderline between a 3 and a 4, that is. It'll all depend on how good the rest of the levels are from now on, but it will take time to get through all of them.