What games require actual skills from players?

[Vipera]

...every game ever that's not luck-based require skills. Seriously, is that even a debate?

However, if you meant very VERY VERY VERY difficult games, I'd say the whole danmaku genre.

 

[Issac]

Most games nowadays feel very handheld. And I mean that the game holds your hand, not that it's a game you play on the go.
I miss the days when games were hard, "NES hard". You had to try and try and try again to beat the games. At the same time I feel that it's terribly convenient with current games and their checkpoints every 4 steps, considering time a finite resource.

Like, I really like the Arkham games, but they're in no way, shape or form difficult.

Oh well, now the challenge lies in achievements for those who care. Games are more or less hard, and if you really want to test your skills: Achievement hunting. (Unless it's those crappy "play 300 hours online" ones).

 

[zerofalcon]

Every video game console or handheld have variety and shape of challenging games, but one thing is true: Since first to fifth/sixth generation, a lot of games were harder than the currently active generation. Today most games does not require a lot of ability or similar conditions, today games are programed to make things easier for the end user, sadly. I have fond memories with the NES and arcade games, try to beat arcade games with one coin was a pain in almost every game, same with tons of NES games, overall that was the real entertainment and fun behind, the replay value was giant.

 

[RichHomieSupreme]

Legitimately speaking. Can call of duty be called "skillful" or just entirely luck based? Is tetris all blind luck too or needs careful planing for one to truly have fun? What about pokemon? MMOs/MOBAs are all "ZURG RUSH!!" to me. The old days were more skill based or is it the same as today's games?
What do you think?

Skill is quite a nebulous term. It all depends on what you consider skillful. Fast reactions, robotic repetition of short windowed combination of button presses, intelligence to make good decisions in the context of the game, those could all be considered skill. but everyone uses a different definition.

 

[jDSX]

Skill is learning, luck is hand holding. Skill is requiring thinking rather than fast reactions at random.

 

[Hungry Friend]

I never completed ninja gaiden. I always went up to the same level, which was very far, but always frustrated to reach so far and never can go further.

On NES, I've not beaten a lot of games.
- Snake Rattle 'N roll (took me ages, few years !!!!) I was sooo happy to finally complete it.
- Castlevania 2 ~ Simon's quest (one of my first completed game, and back then I didn't understood english... just went random everywere until I completed it ). It wasn't a very hard game for me.
- Dragon Ball (my first bought game on NES) easy to complete too, even if some parts or boss were hard.
- Zelda 1 (not hard) but it was satisfying to complete it
- Zelda 2 (hard, and I didn't like it at first, but you learn to like it. Finally I completed it multiple times) That one was satisfying to complete.
- Maniac Mansion.
- few others I completed, but they are not satisfying (like bubble bobble, it's only puzzle levels, one after the other. no real challenge)

There are games I don't remember if I completed or not (gradius, lifeforce, Mario2, Mario3, Chip'n Dale, duck tales, etc.). I think I did.

Games I wish I had completed but never could :
- Ninja gaiden (most frustrating game lol)
- Battle of Olympus (Always fall in a hole where I had to jump over it... damn those "fixed pixel long jumps" were horrible)

My NES stats : 33 never completed, 19 (almost certain) completed

I don't really have the patience to beat a game like Ninja Gaiden anymore. I wasn't able to beat it as a kid with infinite free time and I dunno if I have it in me to beat it today. My NES is broken so if I played through it in an emu, abusing save states would be VERY tempting(if you do that it doesn't count as beating it) and the game is just insanely hard, especially the flying enemies and some of those jumps. Often a combo of the 2.

Beat Zelda 1, haven't beat or tried to beat 2 so I'll stick that one on my list and I'm REALLY bad at Castlevania games. Beat Rondo of Blood(PCE emulated with Magic Engine) with both Richter and the much easier Maria but haven't complete all of the prime levels yet. The PCE got a really good port of Double Dragon 2 and I really wanna try beating that sometime soon as well. It's basically an enhanced version of the NES port with much less slowdown than either the NEs or arcade versions. Music's weird as hell though.

Some of those FF6 ROM hacks are tempting as well.

 

[Vipera]

Most games nowadays feel very handheld. And I mean that the game holds your hand, not that it's a game you play on the go.
I miss the days when games were hard, "NES hard". You had to try and try and try again to beat the games. At the same time I feel that it's terribly convenient with current games and their checkpoints every 4 steps, considering time a finite resource.

Like, I really like the Arkham games, but they're in no way, shape or form difficult.

Oh well, now the challenge lies in achievements for those who care. Games are more or less hard, and if you really want to test your skills: Achievement hunting. (Unless it's those crappy "play 300 hours online" ones).

I'm of the opposite idea. A game's difficulty shouldn't be given by the terrible controls, the glitches or the awful AI.
The NES had a lot of AAA titles (or "first line") that were very difficult. We still get difficult games now, but thank God you have to select the right difficulty or search better. I think it's great that AAA titles' regular difficulty isn't too high, or not as many people would play them. Also, excluding RPGs, older games were 100% shorter than games of the present. You hear people bitching about longevity when the game isn't more than 10 hours long, yet they forget how short Crash Bandicoot was. I'd rather play a fair, yet still difficult game than some of the crap released on the NES (looking at you, Ghosts 'n Goblins).

 

[somewhereovertherainbow]

Online games.

An AI - is just about finding the right combination of pushed button.
Real humans, thats where skills counts.


However, even that we praise Emulators and save abilities todays.
What made games fun was actually when we had to push uself to complete a whole game
in one sitting. Or codes which only was possible to get at certain places , churches in A Battle of Olympus.

 

[Issac]

I'm of the opposite idea. A game's difficulty shouldn't be given by the terrible controls, the glitches or the awful AI.
The NES had a lot of AAA titles (or "first line") that were very difficult. We still get difficult games now, but thank God you have to select the right difficulty or search better. I think it's great that AAA titles' regular difficulty isn't too high, or not as many people would play them. Also, excluding RPGs, older games were 100% shorter than games of the present. You hear people bitching about longevity when the game isn't more than 10 hours long, yet they forget how short Crash Bandicoot was. I'd rather play a fair, yet still difficult game than some of the crap released on the NES (looking at you, Ghosts 'n Goblins).

Well, I agree that difficulty doesn't (or shouldn't) come from terrible controls, glitches or awful AI.
Sure you can raise the difficulty settings of the recent Batman games, but they still aren't that hard just because of the so frequent checkpoints. The same goes for Call of Duty. Dying doesn't mean anything, you can just try again and again.
Of course there are difficult games now too, I haven't actually played Dark Souls and those games so I can't comment on them, but Alien Isolation is a good example. Manual saving, and you have to get to a safe save station to be able to save at all. There's tension, dying means something, you'll have to retry sometimes long segments to work out your strategies.
I must say, the online mode in games like Call of Duty is also skill based, since it's against other players, a lot of strategies, and the game is "different" from the story mode.

I am one of those who actually enjoy shorter games, because I don't feel that I have the time to play long stuff. But again, I agree with you that the games should be fair. Fair and difficult. Zelda 2, Mega man series... oh, and Ghosts 'n Goblins is fair in my opinion

 

[DinohScene]

GTA SA speedrunning.
Cause that game will do everything to ruin your run, EVERYTHING!

 

[Aidan25]

I guess with platformers you need to understand depth perception, abilities of the character/s and the objective of course. You need to also be really fluent with the controls because you could easily fall down back to the start or lose progress if you make a wrong turn or you press the wrong button.

Every game is different so you can't always base it on a genre like I have just done. It also depends on the quality of the game's engine because you need to be able to use the skills that the game wants you to use in their environment while using your own skills as a gamer to work out what to do and to complete the tasks in order to progress. This notion can be applied to most genres and therefore, the majority of games that have been released require some sort of skill and intellect from the player itself to make the right decisions and know how to use what they know to their advantage.

 

[Hells Malice]

Pokemon games do, you need to know a lot to be good

That's not skill, that's just memorization.

Pokemon requires very little skill even against other players. Basically the only skill a person uses is their ability to read their opponents moves and actions. A skill yes, but it's also not that difficult.

 

[Taleweaver]

Legitimately speaking. Can call of duty be called "skillful" or just entirely luck based? Is tetris all blind luck too or needs careful planing for one to truly have fun? What about pokemon? MMOs/MOBAs are all "ZURG RUSH!!" to me. The old days were more skill based or is it the same as today's games?
What do you think?

I'm mostly thinking you're taking things way too broad to properly discuss them.

Let's start with the obvious: almost every game has an element of luck and an element of skill to it. The degrees may vary, but both can be enjoyed (most obvious examples are roughly the extremes: chess and the lottery). Part of playing the game is figuring out how to use the situation. The whole "game XXX is just pure luck" often comes from those who do not understand that it takes skill to turn luck your way. The average player can (or rather: should) see games of poker about pure luck. There is no way to tell what others are holding, so it's just luck whether you have something higher than the others. The skill, however, lies elsewhere: in reading the opponents and calculating the odds to maximize your profits. In other words: skill may be in parts where you don't expect it.

I won't comment on MMO's or MOBA's as I don't play 'em (though I thought 'Zerg rush' was a strategy from starcraft, which is, ironically, an RTS from the old days). But I can tell you this: fun stems from neither skill or luck, and strangely enough not necessarily even a combination of both either. There are specific aspects of a game that can be considered 'fun', and provided luck or skill don't ruin those aspects (eg. by making it feel like you don't accomplish or improve anything), meeting those aspects will make the game fun.
A rather obnoxious example is the clicker game 'Adventure capitalist'. Go play it if you want: it's free. It also requires no skill (it's just literally pressing buttons...there isn't even a win state or a possible bad decision) and no luck (all the odds are layed out before you; there are no hidden things or anything random). Yet it's fun because it gives that tingling sensation of achieving something and getting ludicrously rich.

So I must ask this what is required to have fun? Blind luck or having skill? A card game like yugioh (believe it or not) is very luck based while MTG isn't (think chess) then again it depends on who netdecks who and has the most money to blow on 'netdecking' and calls themselves "the best player" just from copying off of one person's idea. It's bad for the metagame which is why you have anti meta decks stuffs etc for mixing it up but short lived due to well..luck.

I don't follow the MTG scene anymore, but it seems it hasn't changed. But...you call it bad for the metagame, but that's not true: the metagame is something WotC is aware of (unless they collectively forgot about it in the last year or so), and is something they simply cannot avoid...so they'll accept it and work with it.

 

[jDSX]

I'm mostly thinking you're taking things way too broad to properly discuss them.

I don't follow the MTG scene anymore, but it seems it hasn't changed. But...you call it bad for the metagame, but that's not true: the metagame is something WotC is aware of (unless they collectively forgot about it in the last year or so), and is something they simply cannot avoid...so they'll accept it and work with it.

I am being open minded here not one tracked for debate rather than favoring one over the other.

With mtg a metagame can change so drastically with the ban list on the fly that one could be bad for good players with depth and skill and good for others that are just poor with card choices and sportsmanship in general. It's happen before take when mirrodin block was out and affinity was in full throttle, the game because known as slow and bad because of one deck that dominated and couldn't be won against with shear luck of draw. Then tooth and nail came and finally broke the winning streak and proved affinity's tactics were null against the nail deck (a 5 color type too) since then wotc has been banning most of the cards to decks that just ruin anyone's strategy (like memory jar and most vintage cards) power playing is another term for it but I don't want to get into that.

 

[Hungry Friend]

Playing almost any game at a very high level requires skill and practice but it is true that in a general sense, games from the 2600-PS2 era, namely 2600-SNES/Genesis games were much harder and far less user/mass market friendly than many of today's games with some exceptions. They kicked your ass and never said sorry so to speak, even the really popular series like Mario, Castlevania, Megaman and the earlier JRPGs like FF I-IV and early Dragon Quest.(DQ is still fairy old school, least up to VIII)

Usually though when I think of seriously skilled gamers I think of fighting games but I'm also biased towards the genre. High level play of most games requires obsessive practice but fighting game tournaments are the most fun to watch because of how varied peoples' playstyles are.(and yes Smash is a fighter no matter what anyone says)

 

[Taleweaver]

I am being open minded here not one tracked for debate rather than favoring one over the other.

With mtg a metagame can change so drastically with the ban list on the fly that one could be bad for good players with depth and skill and good for others that are just poor with card choices and sportsmanship in general. It's happen before take when mirrodin block was out and affinity was in full throttle, the game because known as slow and bad because of one deck that dominated and couldn't be won against with shear luck of draw. Then tooth and nail came and finally broke the winning streak and proved affinity's tactics were null against the nail deck (a 5 color type too) since then wotc has been banning most of the cards to decks that just ruin anyone's strategy (like memory jar and most vintage cards) power playing is another term for it but I don't want to get into that.

This isn't about open mindedness but practicality. There are entire books written about how to make your games fun (I've personally read "Theory of fun for game design" by Raph Koster...but IIRC, the guys from Extra credits had an entire list that didn't even include that one), and how luck and skill play into that.

I did a quick check on magic: the gathering. You may want to pick your examples a bit more careful: the massive banning of cards in mirrodin's block was eleven years ago. Yes, it had a lot of banned cards (list of ALL banned cards), but you may want to look at all the sets after that: Kamigawa, Ravnica, time spiral, lorwyn/shadowmoor, shards, zendikar, scars of mirrodin, return to ravnica, theros and khans of tarkir had zero banned cards (Innistrad had two). So it's not like they haven't learned. Besides...I played MTG in those days, and it wasn't like I even noticed affinity being ridiculously overpowered. That only mattered if you really HAD to have a deck that won against any other type (meaning: you had to pay for cards that quickly rose in price). For casual play, it was fine.

And that lesson goes for video games as well. My favorite example is the shieldgun in UT2003/2004: the alt-fire set up a shield that blocked incoming damage a bit. Since this was on your melee weapon and only blocked directly in front of you, it's not like anyone noticed. It only mattered in duels at high levels, where it was constantly used to withdraw (thus reducing those matches to a boring-to-watch hide-and-seek game). Epic could've fixed it if they cared...but they assumed (rightfully so) that the majority of players didn't even knew, so it wasn't a priority. Which was true.

 

[jDSX]

I did a quick check on magic: the gathering. You may want to pick your examples a bit more careful: the massive banning of cards in mirrodin's block was eleven years ago. Yes, it had a lot of banned cards (list of ALL banned cards), but you may want to look at all the sets after that: Kamigawa, Ravnica, time spiral, lorwyn/shadowmoor, shards, zendikar, scars of mirrodin, return to ravnica, theros and khans of tarkir had zero banned cards (Innistrad had two). So it's not like they haven't learned. Besides...I played MTG in those days, and it wasn't like I even noticed affinity being ridiculously overpowered. That only mattered if you really HAD to have a deck that won against any other type (meaning: you had to pay for cards that quickly rose in price). For casual play, it was fine.

Yes I know about mtg and the sets because I play on and off, I started with time spiral back in 07 there were a great number of decks to play with and diversity. But I was referring to the ban list back when affinity became a thing (I am sure it's archived somewhere) there was only probably skullclamp on the ban list because of how ridiculously broken it is (not like jitte for example) to a point where they believed the game was going stale and dying from this top tier deck and everyone copying off of it. Before that I haven't a clue what would of been more solid than affinity, look at todays version of it: fast, overwhelming, almost unstoppable, but it is not anymore thankfully now because wotc learned their lesson (except for jund maybe) and it shows the game is more different than it was back in 04.

 

[mechagouki]

This thread is a bit pointless without a clear definition of what constitutes "skill".

Some people have said "beating (insert game name here) is just a matter of memorizing", but surely the ability to identify a solution by repeated experimentation is a skill?

Others have said "just fast reactions", but that for sure is a skill applicable in games and the real world, and a skill that can be improved through exercising it.

Most games reward logical thought processes, and some people have better logic processing than others, though again, practise can improve this too.

Only games that employ a pseudo-random (no truly random events in computers) element require luck (whatever luck is), games with "random" special item placement for instance, some of the weapon drops in Castlevania (SotN amongst others) spring to mind.

What is for sure is that societal change over the last three decades has driven a general reduction in the difficulty levels of video games (there are exceptions). It's worth remembering that home gaming grew out of the popularity of arcade machines, which were designed to make money first and foremost, but rewarded practise and skill with longer play time for your money. It seems to me that gamers have become less patient as the years have passed, they want the reward faster and easier, though on some level -perhaps unconsciously- they are aware that they have traded the sense of achievement that comes with beating a truly hard (but not cheap) game for a dirty hit of quick gratification?

 

[Hungry Friend]

This thread is a bit pointless without a clear definition of what constitutes "skill".

Some people have said "beating (insert game name here) is just a matter of memorizing", but surely the ability to identify a solution by repeated experimentation is a skill?

Others have said "just fast reactions", but that for sure is a skill applicable in games and the real world, and a skill that can be improved through exercising it.

Most games reward logical thought processes, and some people have better logic processing than others, though again, practise can improve this too.

Only games that employ a pseudo-random (no truly random events in computers) element require luck (whatever luck is), games with "random" special item placement for instance, some of the weapon drops in Castlevania (SotN amongst others) spring to mind.

What is for sure is that societal change over the last three decades has driven a general reduction in the difficulty levels of video games (there are exceptions). It's worth remembering that home gaming grew out of the popularity of arcade machines, which were designed to make money first and foremost, but rewarded practise and skill with longer play time for your money. It seems to me that gamers have become less patient as the years have passed, they want the reward faster and easier, though on some level -perhaps unconsciously- they are aware that they have traded the sense of achievement that comes with beating a truly hard (but not cheap) game for a dirty hit of quick gratification?

I think a lot of modern gamers are far too young to remember 2600-SNES/Genesis games and that the younger kids see PS2, GC, DC and Xbox games as old "retro style" games. That generation while mostly offline was kind of the genesis period for what we see as modern gaming, namely the Xbox with Halo and LIVE. I'll keep my opinions and rants to myself but I definitely prefer games from before 2006 or so generally speaking, especially games from around 1986 to 2001. Part of it is nostalgia but I see the mid-late 80s to 2001 or so as the "golden age" of console gaming because there was so much experimentation going on as well as games being generally more difficult. Shit was so much more diverse and the industry was much more open-minded in a lot of ways. Fewer games catered to the casual audience.

To summarize, I don't think a lot of newer gamers are aware of the dumbing down/hand holding that's become popular in more recent games and just see it as normal. Older guys like me(I'm 31) find it glaringly obvious and clearly you do too, but gamers that're 10+ years younger than I am probably aren't even thinking about this issue.

 

[RichHomieSupreme]

Why are checkpoints seen as a way of removing skill from a game? Why does dying need to place you at the beginning of the game? That only makes the game tedious, not difficult. What is skillful about having to redo what you just did because you died? It's like grinding in a jrpg, it's tedious and the time you spend doing it creates a false sense of difficulty because you put so much time into doing it. I mean in a jrpg, your skill is having bigger numbers than whatever you're fighting. In say a platformer without check points, its sorta the same thing, it forces you into repetition and eventually you beat it except it's a little more annoying. I think that the games that either put you against other players or have "randomness" are the most skillful. "Randomness" tests your adaptation and resourcefulness which is why I think that tetris is definitely skillful. Don't get me wrong I enjoy games like ninja gaiden nes and the older Mario games, but I don't think that things like checkpoints and the ability to save anywhere make games less skillful.