Originally posted by Elsabolts

Lord British and the Ultima games.

CHEERS!  I wouldn't call them "hard", but I LOVED their challenges.

Kudos to the OP for mentioning Bard's Tale.  I thought people had forgotten about that game.

I think both UO and Asheron's Call were challenging.

i heard Dark SOuls is hard, i havent played it tho. I found combat hard in most RPGs i played since the snes Japanese rpgs were the best thing (still are the best for me). That was only because i never focused on combat and was always lower level than everything else so got killed very easy. I learned not to avoid combat, ever again... and now everything is easy fight.

Grandia 2 and Valkyrie Profile had some really tough boss fights that involved good hand eye coordination, timing , and strategy.

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?

All of the old school wizardry games were hard as hell.  You had to map out the entire game and characters died permanently.  Puzzles and clues were Kings Quest level of obscure.  For modern RPG's they tend to play out like movies rather than having much challenge.  Dark Souls and Demon Souls are challenging in the extreme.  You feel like the developers tried to make a game where their success is measured in player deaths. 

Xenosaga series. Tons of fights where if you didn't use strategy you would fail. Even the easier fights were important to play smart, since they (sadly) would wear you down with attrition.

The game had its problems (some of the strategic optimization required some tedious research into mobs' various weakpoints, and the attrition fights were a lot less interesting than the genuinely challenging ones) but was very rewarding overall.

(This is without getting into all the challenging Tactics games over the years.)

This is a very difficult old title with lots of traps, false walls, pitch black areas, etc. Mapping is almost a necessity. http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DCDnj3KDiIqE&v=CDnj3KDiIqE&gl=US 

Nethack.

That game you never finished and therefore marked "crap" or "stupid".. that one was hard for you.

I guess it would be easy to find a game that is hard, but not fun (for your taste). A game should be rewarding in some way or you wont play it. I played many games that were hard because it required a ridicolous amount of hours or so high maintenace that it killed the fun. Games that were hard because they were too fast paced for me to keep up, or hard because I wanted to micromanage (perfectionist) but the pace or complexity didnt allow it (certain rts games comes to mind).

Anyway, when people say hard about a mmorpg I think they mean challenging. Opposite of challenging is railroaded, handholding, story based etc. Challenge in a mmorpg is throwing the ball to the player in a way that encourages the player to find his way through a problem, to give the player enough rules to make it controllable, but enough freedom to encourage the players curiousity to take up the challange.

At the moment every game company think that making their games easier will get most players, to have story based games and extremely controlled gameplay makes costs more predictable - They are probably right, it just doesnt create challenging games.

Battle of Olympus. An old RPG action adventure for the NES.

I    N    T     E     R    M    I     S     S    I     O     N 

Question is kinda  hard ,after watching responses,now  we need to decide which one is most "true" rpg

no flaming allowed.

Originally posted by pb1285n
Not only are you all over the place with your post, you seem to be purposely vague with your definition of "hard" so you could shoot down anyone's response to your post.

Just by the way an RPG is structured it's going to get easier the more you build your character. Unless you take out features that make it an RPG (levels, attributes, stat based equipment) or put restrictions to prevent people from out performing enemies (scaling enemy strength) anyone can turn the game into a grind rather then a challenge.

It's really all about how you approach an RPG that determines its difficulty, and your post makes it pretty apparent the type of gamer you are.

^ this

I was making a long response but ended up deleting it. The problem isn't that there's no hard RPGs, the problem is you are looking for chess-style difficulty in an RPG. Chess is a head-to-head competition between two players. RPGs in general are single player games that allow the "hero" to be much more powerful than the opponent. It would be like playing chess multiple times so you can level up and you get more queens than your opponent... it would make chess no longer difficult.

RPGs are difficult for all the reasons you mentioned that you would not consider difficult (figuring stuff out, action-based twitch combat, putting time in to become powerful).

The closest thing I've seen to an "RPG" that can be labled as "difficult" through your criteria is League of Legends, which isn't an RPG at all, but has RPG elements. 

Man I hate it when they move these threads for no good reason as if MMORPGs aren't RPGs.

Originally posted by pb1285n
Not only are you all over the place with your post, you seem to be purposely vague with your definition of "hard" so you could shoot down anyone's response to your post.

Just by the way an RPG is structured it's going to get easier the more you build your character. Unless you take out features that make it an RPG (levels, attributes, stat based equipment) or put restrictions to prevent people from out performing enemies (scaling enemy strength) anyone can turn the game into a grind rather then a challenge.

It's really all about how you approach an RPG that determines its difficulty, and your post makes it pretty apparent the type of gamer you are.

What kind of gamer am I?  That is not very clear to me.

Anyway disagreeing with someone is not shooting them down.  Its just disagreeing.  And this topic has alot of general disagreement.  Thus the question.

Originally posted by gestalt11

Man I hate it when they move these threads for no good reason as if MMORPGs aren't RPGs.

Good MMORPGS are Role Playing games but they anrt Western RPGs, nor Asian RPGs, nor bioware style RPGs.     You shouldn't compare EQ, SWG, WoW or even SWTOR against   KOTOR, BG, Skyrim or FF#, they just anrt the same style of game.   MMOs have vastly different types of gameplay and player expectations, then the solo/co-op rpg.

Originally posted by kjempff

That game you never finished and therefore marked "crap" or "stupid".. that one was hard for you.

I guess it would be easy to find a game that is hard, but not fun (for your taste). A game should be rewarding in some way or you wont play it. I played many games that were hard because it required a ridicolous amount of hours or so high maintenace that it killed the fun. Games that were hard because they were too fast paced for me to keep up, or hard because I wanted to micromanage (perfectionist) but the pace or complexity didnt allow it (certain rts games comes to mind).

 

Anyway, when people say hard about a mmorpg I think they mean challenging. Opposite of challenging is railroaded, handholding, story based etc. Challenge in a mmorpg is throwing the ball to the player in a way that encourages the player to find his way through a problem, to give the player enough rules to make it controllable, but enough freedom to encourage the players curiousity to take up the challange.

 

At the moment every game company think that making their games easier will get most players, to have story based games and extremely controlled gameplay makes costs more predictable - They are probably right, it just doesnt create challenging games.

Well this is the thing that kind of gets me about these discussions.

There are alot of people who say an RPG, particularly MMORPGs, are hard by virtue of the things you do in the world (exploration, find out what is good equipment, figuring out a class etc.).

Then there is a camp that try to claim the combat itself is very challenging.

I don't disagree with the first.  Especially in regards to games like the Ultima series, some of those were huge and very complex.   And i would agree that MMORPGs seem to be progressively lacking in this regard (with some exceptions like EvE).

But they only time I see the second is in relation to games that require basically very good timing during the execution.  Except possibly the person who said Nethack.

I am willing to believe that someone could think some of the turn based Rogue-likes can throw some pretty crazy and challenging situations at you.  And while those games are turn based and often even use ASCII art you can wind up a number siutations where you need to think 20 moves ahead and if you don;t you are dead.  Permanently.

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).

I am still nto really happy with the #1 definition as it really seems to be part of the action genre.  However RPG and action have become so interwined that I guess its just not possible to separate the two.

However I would like to state for the record that almost no game that is action oriented requires the sort of planning ahead that a Rogue-like can force you into except in certain very very high end PvP duels possibly.

Wizardry, Might and Magic, and Bard's Tale were only hard due to the trial and error nature of these games and how unforgiving they can be especially early and midway through these games.  It was quite easy to wander into an area or encounter that would make your party fully wipe at low level with no means of escaping.  They actually get easier once you build up a strong enough party.  Probably not what you are looking for in terms of "hard".  Same goes with JRPGs, some encounters are quite difficult if you jump into them without knowledge of the fight (a few in the older Final Fantasy games for example required you to equip specific gear such as resistances to beat the end game encounters), but overall they are fairly easy once you set yourself up correctly.

The random nature of "Rogue" type games also make them difficult.  Games like Rogue, NetHack, Dwarf Fortress, and Dungeons of Dredmor.  Without a bit of luck and very careful planning you will die a lot and frequently in these games (and the permadeath makes it even harder).

Most RPGs are ridiculously easy if you take out the difficulty from trial and error.  Dark Souls and Demon's Souls are definitely one of the harder RPGs games and are even difficult when compared with games in other genres.  If you include SRPGs, several at genuinely difficult such as Fire Emblem.