Originally posted by troublmaker

I just started playing Skyrim again on the hardest difficulty.  In this difficulty setting pretty much everything two-shots you.  Pretty hard.

But yeah RPGs are usually pretty weak on the difficulty.  The hardest RPGs are usually the ones with really complicated stats that just take so long to understand.

Like honestly, why is charisma ever useful?  Anyone?

The TES series can be brutal on the hardest difficulty especially in the beginning.

If I wanted a challenge I wouldn't play RPGs. RTS games are much more tactical, require a lot more micromanagement and strategy than RPGs. FPS games require quick reactions and are twitch based. Fighting games require you to get used to the timing and memorise all the combos.

RPGs are the only genre where you overpower the game with skills/gear rather than actually getting better at the game. FPS, RTS, racers, sports games, and fighting games all require you to practice to get better. It's your skill that needs to improve not your stats.

Immortal for Sega.... Never once died so many times in one game before.

Originally posted by gestalt11

I don't have a great definition of what is "hard" combat  I left it purposely vague because that state of the current definition and discussion.

 

So let me attempt a definition of "hard" RPG combat and see if people think it makes sense.  Combat in which success hinges upon either one or both of:

1) executing your moves with good timing in which you can make very few mistakes before you die.

      -and/or-

2) being involved, fairly regularly, in tactical situation where you must plan your sequence of moves ahead of time by roughly 10 or more moves and there are only a few out of the possibly 100s of possible combination that will see you survive.

 

Further you must regularly succeed at these in order to make significant progress (with or without save games).

With these definitions I would agree with people that the Dark Souls/Demons Souls line of games is the best recent game. Some of the difficulty lies in the action, but there is a significant amount to those games and are incredibly indepth for what items/weapons/armors/builds etc. can be chosen.

Here is an example from my days of playing Dark Souls:

Spending days fighting a single boss time and time again dying over and over (probably 2 hours a day for 3 days), eventually I "give up" and go online to see what I'm doing wrong and see that the boss is weak against a specific type of damage (in this case its bleeding dmg). I switch up to my weapon which deals bleed dmg (although weaker in other respects) and probably after another 30 minutes I still am unable to beat the boss. I go "farm" souls to get a few more levels to increase my health to better handle the boss' massive attacks (so I don't get 1shot basically) and finally go back to the boss and after 30 more minutes of attempts I am victorious.

I don't know if this scenario would fall into what you are asking about. But I definately rate Demons Souls and Dark Souls as "hard". But there is a decent amount of the game that can simply be overcome by twitch combat prowress and mob attack memorization. The "difficulty" in the Souls series is about learning from death.

**edit**

To push the point even further on your criteria... on death you lose 100% of the "souls" you earned which must be brought to a rest-point in order to spend them for leveling up. You can get the souls back you lost, but you have ONE chance to do so. Also in regards to saving, the game constantly saves the game, so there is no "saving" before the boss fight and loading it up afterwards, you fight all the way from the start, to the boss, and if you fail you have to do it ALL over again.  

Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time:  not all of it was hard but some parts were torture, cough..cough..water temple...cough

old BARDS TALE games. me and my dad had to litterally make a map on graph paper just to remember where things were 2 years later we had most, if not all the game maped out, plus its dungeons. but you still had to play through your game and make sure your part survived. 

Originally posted by needalife214

old BARDS TALE games. me and my dad had to litterally make a map on graph paper just to remember where things were 2 years later we had most, if not all the game maped out, plus its dungeons. but you still had to play through your game and make sure your part survived. 

Worse than that, due to spinner traps you needed to make sure you could navigate even with a map.   And if I remember right Bard's Tale 2 had a dungeon with sections that were permanently dark where you had to make sure to count your steps.

Gothic series, Risen.... anything from Piranha Bytes

Originally posted by fivoroth

Originally posted by troublmaker

I just started playing Skyrim again on the hardest difficulty.  In this difficulty setting pretty much everything two-shots you.  Pretty hard.

But yeah RPGs are usually pretty weak on the difficulty.  The hardest RPGs are usually the ones with really complicated stats that just take so long to understand.

Like honestly, why is charisma ever useful?  Anyone?

The TES series can be brutal on the hardest difficulty especially in the beginning.

If I wanted a challenge I wouldn't play RPGs. RTS games are much more tactical, require a lot more micromanagement and strategy than RPGs. FPS games require quick reactions and are twitch based. Fighting games require you to get used to the timing and memorise all the combos.

RPGs are the only genre where you overpower the game with skills/gear rather than actually getting better at the game. FPS, RTS, racers, sports games, and fighting games all require you to practice to get better. It's your skill that needs to improve not your stats.

Thing with Skyrim on hardest level is it doesn't scale well.  Yes it is brutal initially.  But later on once you are fully geared/skilled the game is pretty ridiculously easy even on the highest setting.  Of course part of that is because they didn't balance crafting well but even with jsut normal crafting it can still be pretty easy especially for certain builds.

Originally posted by pb1285n
See this is where you get confused. In your first post you associate most people's definition of hard with a game or chess and say you have found no challenge from that. Then you say your definition of hard would be planning 10 moves in advanced. You basically just described a game of chess.

Then take a shot at defining it yourself.  Clear it up for us.

Originally posted by Lobotomist

Gothic series, Risen.... anything from Piranha Bytes

Hahaha.. yeah Gothic 3, for me, was freaking hard at first. Especially those effing pigs! hahaha...

Maybe we should talk about rpg aspects that make it more difficult.  Being able to save the game every 3 steps took out any difficulty in rpgs.  You can even save game in mid fight every time you land a good hit in some.  In Dark Souls for example it saves the game constantly so you can't save the game to help progress nor can you escape doom with the reset button.  SWTOR had the worst offender in the "self res".  When you died in that game you could just get back up and keep fighting.  If a boss had minions you had killed before dying the minions would still be dead.  The death penalty in Dark Souls also made the game more difficult since you could lose souls you had collected.  The addition of bonfires kept Dark Souls mechanics from just being too annoying though.  You could spend your souls at bonfires for permanent level increases or other things.  You also respawn at bonfires when you die.  That makes finding a bonfire in dark souls a joyous occasion.  If Dark Souls wasn't challenging enough it also lets other players come into your game to gank you if they use certain items.  But you can also summon other players to help with challenges.  And players can leave messages about that provide hints or blatently lie.  I certainly couldn't help leaving a "Treasure below" message on the edge of a bottomless pit. 

In Dark Souls I really felt like i could make a badass character but it didn't seem to help much with overpowering the game.  Despite stat increases and uber enchanted weapons, most bosses will still kill you quickly if you don't know what you are doing.

Temple of Elemental evil

Originally posted by Dragonantis

 

Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time:  not all of it was hard but some parts were torture, cough..cough..water temple...cough

I remember my son's extreme frustration at that point in that game. Ah the memories!

Originally posted by zephermarkus

the first dragon warrior, baldurs gate series, demon and dark souls, diablo 2 in hardcore mode and i ca gaurentee the combat itself is hard in these games not matter what you do in these games the comabt is hard demon souls u cant even really out lvl anything if u want a hard rpg i recommend playing the souls series.

I'm pretty sure I know what you're talking about, but just to clarify, do you mean the first Dragon Warrior that came out for the NES?  One of my favorite games of all time?

If so, then HELL YES.

Keef the Thief!

Possibly bloodwych and bards tale 1 as well, back before everything was hand holding.

Can Demon's/Dark Souls be considered a "true" RPG though?

Haven't played them myself, so honsetly don't know the answer to that question.  Everything I've heard about the game makes it sound more like an action hack-and-slash with light RPG elements rather than a true RPG though.

Originally posted by Ashindai

Can Demon's/Dark Souls be considered a "true" RPG though?

Haven't played them myself, so honsetly don't know the answer to that question.  Everything I've heard about the game makes it sound more like an action hack-and-slash with light RPG elements rather than a true RPG though.

well is a true RPG?   The souls games have stat points that you distribute through over ten options plus at least a hundred different weapons, and many different options for character development.  It's got as much advancement options as any other RPG i've played, a hell of a lot more than any Final Fantasy type games or games where you have to pick a character class.  If action combat means it isn't a true rpg then I don't know what to say to that. 

Try Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, and Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 1 & 2, all three of them on the PS2.

They have easily the most strategic and in-depth turn-based combat system I have ever seen. Weaknesses and strengths can be (and are) exploited to insane levels by the AI (Of course, you can try to do the same, but one single mistake, sometimes even in a random encounter, can sometimes cost you the entire fight), and each boss battle can take quite a lot of planning and experimenting in order to develop an ideal strategy.

Hito-Shura and Satan (the bonus bosses in DDS 1 & 2, respectively) are considered by many to be the hardest RPG bosses ever. They are clear cases of "Guide, dang it" (you could go on for months wiping on them and even then you might not discover a truly functional strategy), and even then, you still need to maintain absolute control over the flow of the fights AND be a little lucky too. If those fights aren't hard, then I don't know what else could be.

Oh, and all of them have amazing soundtracks too. And stories.

Originally posted by sullivanj69

Maybe we should talk about rpg aspects that make it more difficult.  Being able to save the game every 3 steps took out any difficulty in rpgs.  You can even save game in mid fight every time you land a good hit in some.  In Dark Souls for example it saves the game constantly so you can't save the game to help progress nor can you escape doom with the reset button.  SWTOR had the worst offender in the "self res".  When you died in that game you could just get back up and keep fighting.  If a boss had minions you had killed before dying the minions would still be dead.  The death penalty in Dark Souls also made the game more difficult since you could lose souls you had collected.  The addition of bonfires kept Dark Souls mechanics from just being too annoying though.  You could spend your souls at bonfires for permanent level increases or other things.  You also respawn at bonfires when you die.  That makes finding a bonfire in dark souls a joyous occasion.  If Dark Souls wasn't challenging enough it also lets other players come into your game to gank you if they use certain items.  But you can also summon other players to help with challenges.  And players can leave messages about that provide hints or blatently lie.  I certainly couldn't help leaving a "Treasure below" message on the edge of a bottomless pit. 

In Dark Souls I really felt like i could make a badass character but it didn't seem to help much with overpowering the game.  Despite stat increases and uber enchanted weapons, most bosses will still kill you quickly if you don't know what you are doing.

 Iam not really a huge fan of perma-death games or ones that don't let me save when I want but at the same time save games are wildly abused in RPGs.

Many many people do stuff like save right before a chest and just keep reloading until they get the right loot if a game give random loot generation on opening.