Difficulty in games

If it's not ZDoom, it goes here.

How should difficulty be handled?

No difficulty settings, the game must be accessible to all. (casuals only)
2
5%
Difficulty should scale to player (Resident evil 4)
5
13%
Difficulty should have no other incentive asides challenge and achievements (X-COM)
9
24%
Difficulty gives incentives restricted to higher difficulties (more perks, more levels, better endings, etc.)
8
21%
No difficulty settings, the game must be for the skilled. (git gud)
2
5%
why not all (most) of these? (WildWeasel's suggestion)
12
32%
 
Total votes: 38

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insightguy
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Difficulty in games

Post by insightguy »

Kinda though this would make for an interesting topic, how do you think difficulty should be handled in games?

There seems to be an argument that "git gud" is beginning to become quite annoying in the gaming community, though I do agree with the sentiment that it can be quite barring for new players, there also seems to be a dissatisfaction in the recent difficulty to the point of hand holding like a granny (though it seems to become less vocal over the years with the demand for harder games being a thing and people actually delivering).

So the question becomes how should it be handled to satisfy a majority of players? (because God knows you can't please everyone)
Side question: How competent should we expect players to be getting into the game? (game journalist competent? basement-dwelling level competent? what's the middle-ground?)

I'm personally in the "Difficulty gives incentives restricted to higher difficulties" because it's a great way to get casual players in while giving a small sort of "thanks" to players that take the effort to go through the game at a harder difficulty.

If you want to add anything to the poll, feel free to suggest.

EDIT: I can't chance the poll without resetting the results so if anyone needs more examples (off the top of my head):
  • No difficulty settings, the game must be accessible to all: Portal... I need more examples
  • Difficulty should scale to player: Resident evil 4, Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3,
  • Difficulty should have no other incentive asides challenge and achievements: X-COM, Doom, Most games on steam
  • Difficulty gives incentives restricted to higher difficulties: Bastion & Transistor (the idol and limiter system), Cuphead , Any game that has a different ending on hardmode
  • No difficulty settings, the game must be for the skilled: Dark Souls, bloodborne, Hotline Miami
  • why not all (most) of these?: Left 4 Dead (Reelism mode and the AI director),
Last edited by insightguy on Fri Mar 23, 2018 4:03 am, edited 5 times in total.
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Re: Difficultly in games

Post by wildweasel »

There's no "why not all (most) of these?" option in your poll.

Honestly, I don't see what the harm is in offering settings to the player. Because those who are after challenge can have their challenge, where those who want to just experience the game can do so without feeling insulted or patronized (so I don't really like when games offer "easy" modes only to do something like stick a huge pink ribbon to you for the entire game, or deny you the final boss fight). By all means, offer achievements for beating it on a really hard mode. Hell, offer them for beating said hard mode with further self-imposed limitations (like Resident Evil on Professional with only the knife!). Maybe even offer unique unlockables - which means, sure, not everybody's gonna be allowed access to the Ultimate Weapon that fires lasers everywhere and has infinite ammo, but it's an incentive for players to practice if they want.

Ideally, we'd not only have difficulty settings running a wide gamut, but allow them to be adjusted mid-game (under the provision that it'd lock out said ultimate unlockables if present), and give them plenty of granularity. When was the last time we saw a difficulty menu like System Shock, where you could make the enemies totally brainless but bump up the puzzle difficulty, or remove all the story and puzzles altogether but make the enemies punishingly hard?
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Re: Difficultly in games

Post by insightguy »

wildweasel wrote:(so I don't really like when games offer "easy" modes only to do something like stick a huge pink ribbon to you for the entire game, or deny you the final boss fight). By all means, offer achievements for beating it on a really hard mode. Hell, offer them for beating said hard mode with further self-imposed limitations (like Resident Evil on Professional with only the knife!). Maybe even offer unique unlockables
What about games that only allow for certain things to be used/found at certain difficulty levels? I know you said beat, but if say, a special weapon was only found on hard mode or something, would that still be acceptable?
wildweasel wrote:When was the last time we saw a difficulty menu like System Shock, where you could make the enemies totally brainless but bump up the puzzle difficulty, or remove all the story and puzzles altogether but make the enemies punishingly hard?
So things like ranger mode (there are easy and hard variations of it) and fire emblem normal/hard/lunatic and casual/classic difficulty selection? If so, how would you dissect the game-play of most games?

resource scarcity/gameplay difficulty? (more/less items with harder/easier gameplay)

achivement requirements/ achievement difficulty? (a few/ton of easy/hard missions)
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Re: Difficultly in games

Post by Chris »

wildweasel wrote:Honestly, I don't see what the harm is in offering settings to the player.
I could see a case for a type of game where the priority is on skillful play. Games that don't have much of a story, but a strong focus on puzzles, tactics, or what have you. Offering settings to allow anyone through seems to me like the ultimate in patronizing the player.
allow them to be adjusted mid-game
I'm not actually sure this is a desirable trait, as it restricts what you can do to implement difficulty. Consider the original Doom. The difficulty level alters the number of enemies and items in the map, which alters the amount of ammo you need to expend, the amount available to you, the amount of healing available in the map, and which weapons are available when. You wouldn't be able to change that mid-game without messing up a lot of things, and even changing it between levels wouldn't actually provide the intended difficulty afterward since the difficulty of the earlier levels influenced the player state. That makes balancing that much harder if you can't know how hard the previous map was to the next one.

The Elder Scrolls games I've found actually have a big problem with difficulty balancing for this very reason (among others). It provides a difficulty setting you can change at any time (a ludicrous 100- or 200-point scale in earlier games), which restricts what it can do to influence gameplay difficulty. Worse, by relying on it to provide a level of difficulty comfortable to the player, it leaves huge questions open: am I breezing through this because the difficulty is set too low, or because this area's supposed to be easy? Am I having difficulty with this encounter because it's too high level, or is the difficulty set too high? If I turn it down now for this encounter, am I going to succeed at something I shouldn't be able to yet? I don't want to be constantly be playing a guessing game with the intended difficulty of the game, or second-guessing what the developers intended.

This is also compounded by the fact that providing good difficulty is somewhat a fine art. There's no set of rules that can guarantee a comfortable difficulty curve, you will have moments of inadvertent spikes or dips because of things the devs didn't anticipate. As such, I don't think the available options of implementing difficulty should be restricted just to keep it modifiable mid-game.
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Re: Difficultly in games

Post by Rachael »

Chris wrote:I could see a case for a type of game where the priority is on skillful play. Games that don't have much of a story, but a strong focus on puzzles, tactics, or what have you. Offering settings to allow anyone through seems to me like the ultimate in patronizing the player.
I don't find myself disagreeing with you often, but this is one of those cases.

I see a LOT of merit in offering difficulty options for games - not just for games like Doom, but pretty much any game. It's insulting to offer a game that's a grind more than it is an actual challenge, because whether a casual gamer likes it or not, challenge is actually one of the things that will keep you engaged with a game and keep you from falling asleep while playing it.

However, not all players are of equal skill, and there are more than a number of cases where one player can grasp a very well-constructed challenge very easily, and end up being the ones yawning, themselves, while a different player on the exact same challenge and difficulty will consistently fail seconds in.

It's one of the things designing my final map on the 20 Heretics challenge. Since it's the final map it's naturally supposed to be more difficult than the rest, but I didn't want to give the player a "fuck you" and put them against a super boring fight of 20 maulotars. I feel variety is the spice of life, so I offered the entire pre-boss roster to the player instead, with the exception of boosting their stats to make them a bit more elite and threatening. (To compensate for this, however, I offered the player the entire arsenal and full ammo for each weapon, to give them full agency on how they want to deal with the encounters)

But even so, there's major differences between the difficulty levels. The easier difficulty levels have an extra ring of invulnerability to defeat the final boss, and the difficult setting has the enemies attacking way more often. After I tweaked the difficulty for the highest skill level for our team member who seems to breeze through challenges easily, I got absolutely no further complaints about the map's difficulty from anyone else - mind you, beforehand I was *really* erring on the side of making things low damage and easy despite the final boss having a few "fuck you" mechanics because I wanted him to be actually beatable. I only playtested my level to completion once on the highest difficulty, and after that I never really tried it again - I've mostly left the encounters alone, knowing that it was indeed beatable.
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Re: Difficultly in games

Post by Kotti »

Strange. Here we are discussing in a forum about a game that did difficulty absolutely right and the weirdest concluions are made.

In my opinion player on lower skill settings should not be punished - this isn't merely about skill. Sometimes I am just in the mood for a casual playthrough but knowing beforehand that on the lower skill parts of the game are not accessible would be an instant turn-off. Let's just accept that not all players are made equal and factor that into a game's development. Everything else is bound to alienate potential customers. I neither like it when lower skilled players get insulted by shutting them out from parts of the game nor do I appreciate when games start to cater to the lowest common denominator with no options to increase the challenge.

Of course the players are a big part of the problem as well , highlighted by the Doom community's stubborn insistence on playing on Ultra Violence, no matter how hard a mod is.
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Re: Difficultly in games

Post by Chris »

Rachael wrote:I see a LOT of merit in offering difficulty options for games - not just for games like Doom, but pretty much any game. It's insulting to offer a game that's a grind more than it is an actual challenge, because whether a casual gamer likes it or not, challenge is actually one of the things that will keep you engaged with a game and keep you from falling asleep while playing it.
It's not difficulty settings I'm against. But every game having all the settings that can allow any player to get through. Like the Story Mode that a number of games have been getting recently, which essentially takes away gameplay so that the player can experience the story without difficulty. This is fine for a story-based game since there's still value in experiencing the story without gameplay, but if a game doesn't really have a story and is focused on providing a gameplay challenge, an option to remove said gameplay would leave nothing of value. It would just be an "I Win" option that you get nothing out of, except a rather denigrating gold star for effort if you have to use it, while wasting developer effort. Similarly, having extra-difficult settings isn't something all games need, either.

A game being a grind is a separate issue. Regardless if it's easy, hard, or just right, excessive repetition isn't fun if it's not varied enough to stay interesting.

It should be possible for any type of game to have a range of difficulty settings that covers a range of players, and I'm fully for that, but not every game will have reason for covering every possible player. There's that saying, you can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all the people all of the time (replace 'please' with 'cater to'). Given that every option in a game has its cost, be it in development, testing, or support, it becomes a question of priority. What is important to the game you're trying to make, and how much can you put into it while still ensuring a quality experience.
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Re: Difficultly in games

Post by insightguy »

Added some examples in the opening post so people can get a better Idea of what the poll is saying. Hopefully I picked games that most of us would consider good here.
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Re: Difficultly in games

Post by Caligari87 »

Interestingly enough, just yesterday I watched a video essay about this. Mark Brown has some good material.



The conclusion he comes to is about communicating how the game is intended to play, and then giving the player options to adjust that experience. For example, a poor design would be asking the player on start "permadeath? yes / no" with no explanation that permadeath is actually a core part of the game. A better design is putting gameplay options in a submenu with an explicit warning that enabling / disabling / altering those things changes the developer's intended (presumably lovingly and painfully hand-crafted) experience. He seems to shy away from using difficulty levels like easy/medium/hard, especially if easier ones are named to insult the player (sorry Doom / Wolfen). Upon reflection (nostalgia notwithstanding), I think I agree with this. Generic difficulty levels often don't communicate what they change, nor the "correct" one to use, and a player shouldn't feel slighted for choosing to play a certain way, so long as they know they may not be getting the intended experience. Interestingly, he equates this philosophy with the old-school tradition of cheat codes! They were there for players to use if desired, but it was clear you were "breaking" the intended design to play how you like.

For example, redesigning Doom to fit this philosophy: The game would remove the difficulty menu and default to the equivalent of "hurt me plenty" (like it or not, UV is intended to be hard-mode). A menu would be added under Options, where the player could pick between the various spawn filters and adjust damage/health/pickup multipliers or even enable god mode, infinite ammo, and all inventory/keys. That seems reasonable to me.

TL;DR: The ideal way to handle alternate playstyles and difficulty is to design to your intended vision, and then elevate cheat codes to feature status instead of hidden easter eggs.

8-)
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Re: Difficultly in games

Post by insightguy »

Caligari87 wrote:A better design is putting gameplay options in a submenu with an explicit warning that enabling / disabling / altering those things changes the developer's intended (presumably lovingly and painfully hand-crafted) experience.
Just to clarify, if those gameplay options give a reward for them, like bastion's and transistor's Idol and limiter system, would you be OK with that?
Caligari87 wrote:He seems to shy away from using difficulty levels like easy/medium/hard, especially if easier ones are named to insult the player.
Is it more of a naming thing then?
Deus ex:HR had the "easy/medium/hard" as "give me (A story/A Challenge/Deus Ex)" and that seemed less insulting. Or maybe like fire emblem where easy is normal, normal is hard, and hard is lunatic (or any other insane difficulty name).

Here's the thing, even with the assist mode, it still does penalize you for using it in an achievement sense, so this would still fall under the 3rd option in the poll.
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Re: Difficultly in games

Post by Caligari87 »

I personally have never really cared about achievements / trophies. I suppose if it's necessary to include, then I'd do something like have separate achievements for various configurations ("Beat Game" and "Beat Game with Assist Mode" or something).

The naming thing is mostly about A) clarity, and B) not shaming the player (even indirectly). Normal / Veteran / Ubermensch implies that players who chose normal are somehow not as good as players that chose veteran, etc. It encourages division and superiority among players ("pfft, you play on HMP? Get gud scrub, UV is the only way to play."). I think I agree with the sentiment that a better solution is not using canonical "difficulty settings" at all, but rather allowing the player to tweak their personal experience in some fashion (preferably with clear communication for each option and with some slight barrier such as putting said options in a submenu rather than at the start of the game).

8-)
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Re: Difficultly in games

Post by insightguy »

I agree with point A, but...
Caligari87 wrote:I think I agree with the sentiment that a better solution is not using canonical "difficulty settings" at all, but rather allowing the player to tweak their personal experience in some fashion (preferably with clear communication for each option and with some slight barrier such as putting said options in a submenu rather than at the start of the game).
Like that's going to curb the elitism. "pfft, you play with *insert setting here* on/off? Get gud scrub, *insert setting here* on/off is the only way to play." or with the celeste example "pfft, you play with assist mode on? Get gud scrub, base settings is the only way to play." :P

In all seriousness: I don't think the elitism is as a big deal as some make it out to be, I get that it's annoying and can be discouraging to some, but I don't think making it the main focus is actually helping the problem. If it's really all about the personal experience, then why the hell would you care about some other dude on the internet who managed to do it another way? Maybe getting rid of the shaming difficulty names is not a bad idea, but feeling shame for playing on normal because some people play on hard? I honestly don't really see that.

Also, if anyone considers themselves "superior" because they beat the game at a greater difficulty is not a very accomplished person. But saying "WOHO FKYEAYH I DIDIT" is just alright, because hey, finishing hard video games still has a sense of accomplishment, just don't use it to justify how "superior" you are.
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Re: Difficultly in games

Post by Shadelight »

insightguy wrote:In all seriousness: I don't think the elitism is as a big deal as some make it out to be

Also, if anyone considers themselves "superior" because they beat the game at a greater difficulty is not a very accomplished person. But saying "WOHO FKYEAYH I DIDIT" is just alright, because hey, finishing hard video games still has a sense of accomplishment, just don't use it to justify how "superior" you are.
This type of personality is, sadly, incredibly common. I think that's why it should be a bigger deal.
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Re: Difficultly in games

Post by Caligari87 »

Also why I think canonical difficulty settings are partially to blame. They're basically enforced player skill segregation. More granular gameplay customization on the other hand is very clearly something that can be chalked up to personal taste.

In other words, easy is inferred as a developer-sanctioned equivalent to "I'm not gud enough to play on hard." Of course, all this is splitting hairs because haters gonna hate, but it's more about the message the developer is sending rather than players' perception of each other.

Seriously though, I highly encourage watching the video if anyone hasn't. Explains it really well.

8-)
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Re: Difficultly in games

Post by wildweasel »

I don't really feel like reading the rest of the thread to address specific points, but I feel like I can better demonstrate what I'm looking for with this screenshot of Forza Horizon 3's difficulty settings menu.

There are TONS of options in here, primarily for driving assists like easier steering, automatic braking, a "driving line" and the ability to disable vehicle damage - but there's also settings to disable the anti-lock braking, traction control, and forcing your car into manual transmission. Using these settings, the player can tailor the game's difficulty to their desires, and the game will reward riskier players by increasing the amount of credits earned for completing a race. Players looking to earn more money can weigh and balance these settings on their individual merits - say you want to try racing with a manual gearbox and simulation damage, but it's hard to deal with the opponent drivers that way. At that point, bump down the "Drivatar" (opponent) difficulty, and they'll be easier to overtake, while the car itself is now harder to drive, and you are rewarded accordingly. The best of the best of the best can set the Drivatars to Professional, get rid of all the driving assists, enable car damage, and turn off Rewind, which results in more than double the amount of money paid per race.

In this sort of game, individual rewards are not locked to the player if they play on an easier setting, since experience points are earned at the same rate regardless of setting, but more confident players earn money more quickly so they can afford to buy the cars they like, instead of scrimping and saving or relying on the level-up "wheelspins" to get new cars.
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