Glossary Entry: Fake Difficulty

Fake difficulty is a form of poor game design. While the exact form it depends on the situation where it appears, the concept is always the same: for whatever reason, the developers weren't able to make something as challenging as they thought it should be, and so they "fixed" the problem in an inept way. For example, an otherwise unimpressive boss might be given far too many hit points or instakill attacks that cannot be dodged.

This sort of thing is ridiculously easy to spot, and players absolutely hate it since it typically ruins the fun. In a way, it's like a group of little kids playing a game of "cops and robbers", but whenever Kevin gets "shot", he claims his force field deflected the bullet, invents some superpower that makes him (and only him) immune to bullets, or just spouts some other silly reason why the imaginary bullet missed. To the other kids, this will get old really fast.

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