Every six months or so I find myself stranded from my computer. This forces me to work on my tablet, and that’s never a particularly productive enterprise, for a number of different reasons. I can’t properly rename images, the attached keyboard is missing basic features, the lack of screen real estate makes splitting the screen a non-starter, highlighting text is a chore, and so on and so forth. There’s not much that I can do other than pure writing.
I don’t want this site to go much longer than a week without a new upload, so I figured I’d pen another entry in the I Hate Modern Gaming series. Besides, it’s been months since I last shit on the Fromsoft Femboys. That just won’t do.
But before I get into that, let’s start with a thought experiment. I assume that you are familiar enough with basic math that a one digit addition problem, such as 1 + 3 = x, is no great challenge for you. I sit you down at a table, randomize the numbers, and ask you for to solve one such problem. If and when you get the correct answer, I give you five dollars.
Fail and I blow your brains out.
Is it accurate to call this a difficult task? Is it made more difficult if I force you to correctly answer a series of ten straight one digit addition problems in a row? What about one hundred?
Of course it is well known that the fight or flight response tends to make intellectual challenges more difficult. There are many examples of otherwise intelligent, rational people acting stupidly when stressed. Perhaps I chose too extreme of an example.
Let’s take the stakes down a notch, and propose that, instead of holding a gun to your head, I simply take five dollars from you. If I increase the amount of money you owe me upon an incorrect answer to five thousand dollars, does that increase the difficulty of this task?
Let’s say that we have two math exams with ten questions each, and a generous time limit. One of these exams is university level, the other was stolen from Ms. Piggles grade one math class. All things being equal, no one in their right mind would claim that these two exams could possibly be of equal difficulty.
However, what if the grade one exam requires you answer every single question correctly, while the university exam requires only the normal 50% mark? What if we let you immediately retake the university exam, but required you to sit in the dunce corner for an hour before taking the grade one exam again? What if we extended the grade one exam to be one thousand questions long – with an appropriate increase in allotted time – but stuck with the required 100% success rate?
If we look at difficulty as some combination of failure rate mixed with time to clear, it is probably true that we can make a simple math exam for six year olds just as “difficult” as a math exam made for adults. Cheap bullshit can be added to anything.
But could you imagine anyone willingly subjecting themselves to a six hours long first grade math exam made artificially difficult through zero tolerance for mistakes and ridiculous over-punishment? Could you imagine an entire community of people who did this and considered themselves hardcore mathematicians? Could you imagine someone complaining about the weirdly punishing and tedious math exam made for six year olds, perhaps wanting a few mulligans or not having to sit in the dunce corner for an hour, and the responses are idiots spamming “skill issue,” and “git gud, casual” at them in response?
It is that thought which brings us, finally, to the Soulscucks.
The “Representative Director and President” of FromSoftware is Hidetaka Miyazaki. I don’t hate the guy personally, but it has become clear to me that his genius lies in marketing, not game design. He is the master of the reframe, encouraging his obnoxious army of midwit fanboys into mindlessly regurgitating whatever lame, bullshit excuse he comes up with for objectively terrible design. Remember, it’s not bad design if it’s “intentional.”
Remember the guides that praised the game for “not holding your hand.”
Through the power of marketing and neuro linguistic programming, the Soulsbornes have become synonymous with difficulty. Games that boil down to pressing the i-frame button at the right time, like Bop-It with better graphics, have been reframed not as slop made for casuals, but the pinnacle of hardcore gaming for the tvue gamerinos.
A common argument you’ll hear from the Fromsoft Enjoyers is that, ackshually, these games are not difficult. In fact, they’re quite easy, provided that you are fine with having your time deliberately wasted have enough patience.
I could have continued to waste my time searching for more examples, but Brave’s neural net generated answer does a good job of rewording this sentiment. “AI” has always been a good plagiarist, which in this case is what we want.
Dark Souls is often perceived as a difficult game, but many players argue that it is not inherently hard but rather unforgiving and requires patience and understanding of its mechanics.
The problem with this statement is that it is, unfortunately, completely accurate. Dark Souls type combat is nothing more than harsh punishment piled on top of rote memorization. The kind of thing that was widely denounced by gamers twenty years ago.
I’ve talked about Halo 2 twice before. Playing through the Legendary difficulty remains my most hated gaming experience of all time, because it was full of cheap bullshit. There are many problems with the enemy design of that game, but there is nothing that personifies Halo 2 quite like the sniper jackal.
Mike Miller’s Halo 2 Legendary Walkthrough (2004):
Meet your new nemesis: the jackal sniper.
Allow me to editorialize for a minute in order to express properly how much I despise this new enemy. It’s not so much that they’re difficult; indeed, once you go through the initially torturous, brute-force process of memorizing their locations one cheap death at a time, they are more or less downgraded from the level of aneurysm-inducing frustration to severe nuisance.
My problem at this point is largely with the way that they shatter the immersion of the game. It’s just ridiculous when you can watch every other enemy in the game except drones—including your unshielded marines, and even grunts, for God’s sake—absorb multiple beam rifle shots, and yet the Chief, icon of the series, with his fancy armor and upgraded shield, always dies from a single shot. This sort of incongruity serves only to reduce the experience from that of a balanced, consistent interactive world to typical, cheap video game capriciousness.
There’s also the fact that the presence of jackal snipers, with their one-shot kills and supernatural accuracy and reaction time, tends to limit your options in many areas, subverting the open-endedness of the combat which otherwise is the series’ best quality. Bungie, if you’re listening: please…don’t do this to us again, ok? It’s just annoying.
Bungie made every single possible design mistake with the jackal snipers. First, they kill the player in one hit. Second, they fire almost immediately after seeing the player. Third, they telegraph neither their shots, nor their spawns. Fourth, and compounding these first three problems, there are a ton of them.
A high count might not be immediately obvious as a problem, but the issue is that they effectively cover way too much ground. If there was one single jackal it would be possible, assuming cooperative level design, to weave through cover in such a way as to shield yourself against him at all times, before eventually closing the distance. That would lead to interesting gameplay. Unfortunately, they spawn like crazy, and if they build up in number you are effectively dead the second you step out of cover.
As a result, you need to be killing the jackal snipers the second they spawn, and there’s no way of knowing where and when that is until you die enough times that you have their spawns committed to memory. Having said that, provided that you’re willing to waste enough of your precious free time, you too can grind your way through Halo 2 on Legendary, one cheap death at a time. In the end, the only skill that these guys test is the ability to not break your controller out of frustration.
This is what Mike Miller meant when he said that the sniper jackals are not actually difficult. Before you have the sniper jackal spawns memorized, they aren’t hard, they’re impossible. After you have their spawns memorized, they are trivial. It’s as “difficult” as unlocking a three digit bike lock through brute force guessing.
If you replace “spawns” with “moves,” you have the recipe for every Soulsborne boss of all time. Grind away, cheap death after cheap death, boss runback after boss runback, until you learn the precise time you’re supposed to press the circle button, and the time when you press the r1 button to shave off 1% of the boss’s health. Or, alternatively, get your hand held watch some YouTube guides to speed up this process. Either way, waste enough of your life doing this, and the bosses go from impossible to trivial.
In 2004, Mike Miller joined the rest of us begging Bungie to never create such a garbage enemy again, and in Bungie’s defense, they never did. Sure, the sniper jackals make an appearance in Halo 3, and even still kill in one hit. However, they cranked down their numbers, and made them wear these glowing head things so that players can actually see them before they get shot, as opposed to after. Still not a great enemy, but miles better.
Halo 3 version.
Halo 2 has been re-released in various forms over the years, most recently with the Master Chief Edition in 2020. Coincidentally, a whole new batch of players were introduced to this particular form of ass cancer.
I’ve played Halo 2 many times since I was a kid, beaten it a handful of times. But I always played on normal. The other day I started a great journey to beat every Halo game I own on Legendary. Halo CE was incredibly challenging, I have a hard enough time with that game on Normal. Then I got to Halo 2.
Fucking Jackal snipers EVERYWHERE kill me left and right don’t even give me a fuckin chance to see where they are goddamn bullshit beam rifle lizard bird lookin ass just give me a goddamn SECOND to see where you are before killing me in one shot and then respawning and killing me again and I still don’t know where the fuck you are holy shit did Bungie just examine every single polygon of their game to determine the most bullshit places to put a Jackal sniper because it sure as fuck feels like it holy shit the Covenant marksmanship program must make up at least 85% of their defense budget because these sons of bitches are around every street corner and behind every rock in the known universe just waiting for a single atom of Master Chief’s helmet to poke around the corner so that they can immediately kill you before you even knew that you were exposed holy fuck I’m not even on Delta Halo yet someone please kill me oh wait the Jackals already will from 10km out.
Back in the day, the frat boys who played Halo universally shit on the hated sniper jackals. They were unanimously seen as a horribly designed enemy. It was not deemed a “skill issue,” if you hadn’t memorized all their spawns, nor were you looked down should you have no desire to. It was not the player who was told to “git gud,” but rather Bungie’s sandbox designers.
This is partly because the Halo fandom, while extremely strong, was never the weird “we must not criticize the leader” cult that FromSoftware and Miyazaki have cultivated. It was also partly because even Halo frat bros had more videogame literacy than the average Soulscuck. Cheap bullshit was correctly identified as cheap bullshit, and the toxic culture of tolerating shit tier design that wastes your time over and over again had not yet been meme’d into existence.
To some extent, this cancerous idiocy has been quarantined over there in the kiddy pool where it belongs. Unfortunately, perhaps carried by a flood spore, in my research for this piece I stumbled upon a viral outbreak of Tolerate Cheap Bullshitism Git Gudism even in this community.
Halo 2 is probably the worst campaign known to man.Jackal Snipers are without a doubt the worst game design to date of any game to ever come out. It’s lazy it’s unfair and it pisses me off. Any developers who worked on this game deserve Jail time. Anyone who thinks this is part of the golden trilogy should immediate be eradicated from the planet. It’s like dark souls 2. It’s not good.
OP’s post is reasonable enough. I don’t know if the sniper jackals are the worst enemy ever designed, but it’s hard to think of worse. Unfortunately, a wild Git Gud is spotted in the responses, along with a Skill Issue.
Babies crying for not knowing how to avoid Jackals on Legendary(aka, thats why its hard af?).
Whats next? Hard mode way to hard?– User “vitaminar”
diagnosis: skill issue
– User “heavymain666”
i have no problem with the jackals, or dark souls 2. So i don’t think the problem is the games, Its you man.
– User “Steel”
These dudes know what’s up. GIT GUD.
– User “Zlop”
i feel like the jackal sniper thing is more of a meme. halo 3 has pretty annoying jackal snipers, too (this is coming from someone that has solo’d H2 legendary with a couple skulls enabled), but if you’re actually good they’re really not that hard to deal with, especially if you can aim and are using m&k.
– User “yomegonightcore”
Twenty years ago everybody and their mother shit all over the sniper jackal. Twenty years ago the gaming community was full of people who were more interested in having fun playing a game than bragging about grinding their way through cheap bullshit. Now, somehow, someway, you can’t even complain about jackal snipers without a pack of peanut brained mouthbreathers whose brains have overdosed on shitty memes finger wagging at you for not tolerating tedious, unfair, shallow design. It doesn’t matter if you and everyone else finds it frustrating. In this case, the customer is always wrong.
I stopped caring about the gaming e-community about fifteen years ago, and only started caring again because I am developing a game. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that, like everything else, it has declined not just in terms of poz, but even in basic game literacy. But I am still disappointed.
