Difficulty Curves
Videogames never end well. I can tell I'm approaching the end of Dead Space 2, because it's stopped being any fun to play.
Dead Space 2 is a game that excels at pace and tension, of tight encounters spaced out by foreboding treks through a dilapidated space station. Or at least it is until the final act, where it becomes a bad shooting gallery. Every room you walk into fills with fleshy tentacle baddies, and you shoot them until they are dead. Rinse and repeat. Tension is lost in favour of jacking up the difficulty to create an 'exciting' end game.
Dead Space 2 is not a great shooting game, and when it tries to become one, it stops being very enjoyable.
Difficulty curves are something games developers have yet to grow out of. The rule goes that the last thing you do needs to be the hardest thing there is in the game. It's usually a boss battle. It's usually not much fun.
The trouble with this format is that the last thing you do is also usually the most frustrating thing you have to do in the game, and this means that's the lasting memory you have of the game. There are so many games I've played that I've enjoyed pretty much all the way through, only to get pissed off in the last hour or so due to an onslaught of enemies, a poorly designed boss battle, or some other badly thought out difficulty-raising device. And I always remember these games less fondly for it.
I understand the reason for the difficulty spike; as the player grows familiar with the game, the challenge needs to grow too, or they'll become bored with it. But it needs to be handled better. Difficulty should not ramp up incessantly until some final, teeth-grinding battle, followed by a cutscene. There should be some downtime at the end of the game, a period to reflect on what you've achieved. Players will remember the game more fondly for it.
Metroid (pretty much all of them, I think) is a good example. You fight the final boss, the climax of the difficulty curve, but the climax of the actual game is the subsequent escape from the exploding planet/space-station/whatever. The escape sequence isn't hard, in the traditional sense, in that it's unlikely that you'll lose at this point, but it's still tense and exhilarating. You're left with that feeling of exhilaration, rather than the memory of the boss fight that you might have died numerous times on beforehand.
I have many issues with the way games treat difficulty and progression. There's always a point where 'challenge' surpasses 'entertainment', and most games cross it at some point. They almost universally have frustrating difficulty spikes.
I think a good thing for developers to study is the three-act film structure. Films don't end immediately after the last climactic struggle. If they did, people would be pissed off. There's always a cool-down period, where the characters come to terms with their accomplishments and their character arcs are tied off.
Games don't do this, or if they do, it's usually expressed through a cutscene, which doesn't really count. Why can't we have a nice cathartic slice of actual gameplay, where the real threat is over but there're still a few smaller hurdles to overcome? This would go a long way towards softening the often frustrating climax of a game's difficulty curve.
