Tuesday, November 24, 2009
On Difficulty Levels
Player-selectable difficulty levels in games, in general, suck.
I do not have a fundamental problem with the idea. My time is at such a premium that I'm really not one who wants a full-on ultra-hardcore emit-blood-sweat-and-tears-for-every-checkpoint-achieved type of player. I played Bioshock on easy (I think) because it was a rental and I just wanted to get through it to the end. Conceptually, difficulty levels are a Good Thing.
But in practice, they suck.
When designers are trying to balance the overall challenge of a game, there are a lot of really clean, easy-to-change, easy-to-program, almost invisible parameters that can be modified to make things work. Like how much damage the player can take before dying. Or how much damage the player does, on the average - which means the enemies fall faster. Some are a little more complicated, like the placement of health or ammo pick-ups.
The problem arises when "difficulty level" uses these same parameters. After all, it's the same one the designers use! But really, all I'm choosing as a player is my level of handicap. Gee, do I want trivial and boring, or do I want punishing and headache-inducing? Neither? Okay, let's choose "Normal" difficulty.
There are two things that bug me about this.
First, but least importantly, is the gamer mindset. As a gamer, I'm always calculating risk (or cost) vs. reward ratios when I'm playing a game, and that includes the difficulty options screen. I'm immediately thinking, "So what do I get if I choose the punishingly hard road?" In general, nuthin'. There's no benefit at all for choosing the hardest difficulty level unless I am such an expert player that anything less challenging makes me fall asleep.
Give me something different. Bonus content. An extra level. Even more enemies ( or earlier appearances of tougher enemies) beats "nothing. " Maybe I'm hung up on replayability, but I'd like to have a slightly different experience playing through on hard than on medium rather than just dying more frequently.
And I don't want what feels like an artificial or arbitrary increase in my challenge. Simply making it easier to die is... lame. Again, more enemies is something. Less frequent pick-ups can work, though that also gets frustrating in a hurry.
Better AI is awesome. In an RTS, if changing difficulty only allows the AI to cheat or gives them bonus resources, I'm not a fan. But give me a smarter opponent that will surprise me and give me a more interesting challenge? I'm all over that. This isn't hard to implement in an RPG, either, where enemies might "forget" to use their most effective abilities as often as they should, or pick their targets unwisely ("Let's cast silence on the fighter!").
The problem is that this takes more work. A lot more work. I've never seen a game budget where any consideration at all was placed on difficulty levels, and as a result they were always implemented as an afterthought to fulfill some nebulous bullet-point in the design doc. And so difficulty levels will continue to be implemented in as lame a manner as possible for 99% of games.
And so difficulty levels will continue to suck.
Labels: Game Design
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:50 AM (Permalink)
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Of course, there are also players who will be annoyed if there is bonus content at higher difficulty levels, if they're not able to reach it...
"Of course, there are also players who will be annoyed if there is bonus content at higher difficulty levels, if they're not able to reach it..."
Count me among those. I shouldn't be locked out of some portion of a game just because I'm not good enough. To take racing games as an example: making opponents smarter or tweaking rubberbanding etc. on a higher difficulty level is fine. Not giving me access to certain tracks/cars is not.
Count me among those. I shouldn't be locked out of some portion of a game just because I'm not good enough. To take racing games as an example: making opponents smarter or tweaking rubberbanding etc. on a higher difficulty level is fine. Not giving me access to certain tracks/cars is not.
Ironically, at least in an RPG, some of your suggestions for making a game more difficult will probably, in the end, make the game *easier*. If harder difficulty levels include bonus content/levels, that means players on 'hard' gain additional exp, equipment, gold, etc. Simply adding more enemies to an encounter provides the same benefits.
Adjusting AI, of course, is usually ideal, from a player's standpoint. But, as you said, difficult to implement properly, as this normally requires a lot of tweaking. And, if you use something like fuzzy logic and don't set parameters properly, its possible a very unlucky, 'easy' player will end up in a situation that is normally seen only be the 'hard' players.
Adjusting AI, of course, is usually ideal, from a player's standpoint. But, as you said, difficult to implement properly, as this normally requires a lot of tweaking. And, if you use something like fuzzy logic and don't set parameters properly, its possible a very unlucky, 'easy' player will end up in a situation that is normally seen only be the 'hard' players.
# posted by 
: November 24, 2009 11:49 AM
: November 24, 2009 11:49 AM
Ah, but that's what cheat codes are for!
Oh, wait, sorry, I forgot we're living in 2009. That's what... premium downloadable content is for... for just a few dollars more... ugh.
Oh, wait, sorry, I forgot we're living in 2009. That's what... premium downloadable content is for... for just a few dollars more... ugh.
I definitely agree with the general suckitude of difficulty levels. I played through The Suffering on Insane and all they seemed to do was increase the hit points of the enemies. It should NOT take 8 point blank shotgun blasts to kill an enemy on ANY difficulty level.
Best difficulty switch for me was playing Crysis on the hardest level. You lost most of your hud (including your crosshair) and the enemies spoke Korean instead of English. It really was a different experience.
Best difficulty switch for me was playing Crysis on the hardest level. You lost most of your hud (including your crosshair) and the enemies spoke Korean instead of English. It really was a different experience.
I really liked the difficulty levels in Goldeneye on the N64. Higher difficulty meant more objectives, which meant that you needed to explore more and encounter more enemies.
It also meant that your auto-aim was switched off, so you had to manually aim at the room full of enemies you would have had access to, but never actually needed to walk into on a lower setting.
That sort of difficulty change is a smart one, and somewhere between the 'make all foes paper-thin / titanium skin' and the 'micro-manage every decision a foe makes'. I don't think it'd be that difficult to implement too... Even in an RPG, just make a quest a bit longer and more involved than 'find my badger' and reduce the XP for each stage.
It also meant that your auto-aim was switched off, so you had to manually aim at the room full of enemies you would have had access to, but never actually needed to walk into on a lower setting.
That sort of difficulty change is a smart one, and somewhere between the 'make all foes paper-thin / titanium skin' and the 'micro-manage every decision a foe makes'. I don't think it'd be that difficult to implement too... Even in an RPG, just make a quest a bit longer and more involved than 'find my badger' and reduce the XP for each stage.
I wrote about difficulty on my own blog, partially in response to Jeff Vogel's recent post about how games need to be easier. I agree with you that difficulty levels suck for multiple reasons, although I didn't go into detail in my post. Usually you just get the "8 shotgun blasts to the chest" problem that Morinar mentioned above. If you can get it to work, difficulty levels are probably is the best solution, though.
I'm also in the "extra content for hard mode usually sucks" camp. I remember playing the Resident Evil games and being really disappointed in how you had to play the game super-fast and with few saves just to get some extra goodies. I never had the patience for it, and by the time I got good enough to master the game to that point I probably didn't want to use another out fit anyway.
So, what's an appropriate reward? Something more than mere bragging rights, I guess, but less than content that some people won't be able to unlock?
I'm also in the "extra content for hard mode usually sucks" camp. I remember playing the Resident Evil games and being really disappointed in how you had to play the game super-fast and with few saves just to get some extra goodies. I never had the patience for it, and by the time I got good enough to master the game to that point I probably didn't want to use another out fit anyway.
So, what's an appropriate reward? Something more than mere bragging rights, I guess, but less than content that some people won't be able to unlock?
Something better than the lame "extra scene" that Loom gave us on "hard" difficulty. Of course, that game could be played in four hours the first time, so it was almost expected that you'd eventually beat it on hard.
(For those who never played - it was a two-second scene of Cob looking under Bobbin's hood and meeting his fate - instead of a fade-to-black.)
(For those who never played - it was a two-second scene of Cob looking under Bobbin's hood and meeting his fate - instead of a fade-to-black.)
Painkiller (and its sequels) has different levels for each difficulty setting. You basically have to play in all difficulties if you want to play all levels :-P.
Older FPS (and some other games) had different item placement for different difficulty settings. In all Doom editors, for example, you could set in which difficulty levels each item will be available. Same in Quake and i'm sure (even if i didn't tried myself) that Quake 2 was the same.
Especially in Quake 1 different difficulty settings can change the experience a lot. Some custom maps even provide different gameplay elements on different difficulty levels.
Personally i'm in favour of difficulty settings as long as they make sense. Changing the enemy's health from 30 hp to 60 hp doesn't really make the game any different. Personally when i say i want to play in a higher difficulty level i mean i want to kill more monsters and maybe (but only maybe :-) find less helpful items, not have monsters appear for more in my screen.
Older FPS (and some other games) had different item placement for different difficulty settings. In all Doom editors, for example, you could set in which difficulty levels each item will be available. Same in Quake and i'm sure (even if i didn't tried myself) that Quake 2 was the same.
Especially in Quake 1 different difficulty settings can change the experience a lot. Some custom maps even provide different gameplay elements on different difficulty levels.
Personally i'm in favour of difficulty settings as long as they make sense. Changing the enemy's health from 30 hp to 60 hp doesn't really make the game any different. Personally when i say i want to play in a higher difficulty level i mean i want to kill more monsters and maybe (but only maybe :-) find less helpful items, not have monsters appear for more in my screen.
I think I may have mentioned it before, but "the world ends with you", an urban setting action-RPG on DS, has a pretty terrific implementation of difficulty.
Whenever you're not in battle you can freely change the difficulty level. You don't get all difficulties from the get-go though, you start with only "normal", then receive "easy" after your first battle, then the "hard" and "ultimate" difficulties can be acquired later in the game.
When you die you can immediately choose to redo that fight in a lower difficulty if you don't think you'd be making it at your current difficulty and don't want to load a saved game that'd set you back.
Now the first really great bit is, each difficulty has its own drop table, and it's important since the game has a collection aspect: each of the 304 drops acts as a different variation of a power or weapon for your character. And it's not even that the high-difficulty drops are more efficient, usually they're simply more exotic and unusual (to the point where side-effects and even primary effects may not even be described and you're left to figure them out for yourself, and some are really weird, like there's one where the attack pattern depends on your UI layout). So there's that whole pokemon aspect where you have to explore difficulty to get the whole collection, and can actually do so even if you're not that good because you can get good powers at low difficulties to make tackling the highter ones a bit easier.
The second interesting aspect is a handicap system. At any moment you can choose to temporarily sacrifice levels to increase drop rates, which is useful because some drops have very low base probabilities. You can also chain fights without the opportunity to heal in-between, for the same effect (and cumulate it with the other handicap).
The system is brilliant because it makes it possible for players to fine-tune their difficulty as they go through the game, for beginners to go through the whole game with a chance to finish it and, because of the fine tuning, get better, and it actually turns the very act of selecting difficulty into an interesting and integral gameplay element.
Whenever you're not in battle you can freely change the difficulty level. You don't get all difficulties from the get-go though, you start with only "normal", then receive "easy" after your first battle, then the "hard" and "ultimate" difficulties can be acquired later in the game.
When you die you can immediately choose to redo that fight in a lower difficulty if you don't think you'd be making it at your current difficulty and don't want to load a saved game that'd set you back.
Now the first really great bit is, each difficulty has its own drop table, and it's important since the game has a collection aspect: each of the 304 drops acts as a different variation of a power or weapon for your character. And it's not even that the high-difficulty drops are more efficient, usually they're simply more exotic and unusual (to the point where side-effects and even primary effects may not even be described and you're left to figure them out for yourself, and some are really weird, like there's one where the attack pattern depends on your UI layout). So there's that whole pokemon aspect where you have to explore difficulty to get the whole collection, and can actually do so even if you're not that good because you can get good powers at low difficulties to make tackling the highter ones a bit easier.
The second interesting aspect is a handicap system. At any moment you can choose to temporarily sacrifice levels to increase drop rates, which is useful because some drops have very low base probabilities. You can also chain fights without the opportunity to heal in-between, for the same effect (and cumulate it with the other handicap).
The system is brilliant because it makes it possible for players to fine-tune their difficulty as they go through the game, for beginners to go through the whole game with a chance to finish it and, because of the fine tuning, get better, and it actually turns the very act of selecting difficulty into an interesting and integral gameplay element.
# posted by : November 24, 2009 3:59 PM
: November 24, 2009 3:59 PM
I second the nod towards Goldeneye as a game that did difficulty right. Enemy health, your health, and damage all stayed the same, you were just forced to do more, and be around the enemies longer. At higher difficulties the game became more interesting without sacrificing the skills you may have picked up in easier difficulty modes.
Also, Goldeneye did something I wish more games would do. If you beat the game on the Hard setting, you unlocked an additional "difficulty" mode called 007. This was unique because it opened up the parameters under the game's hood, letting you tweak how much health you and enemies would have(separately), how much damage weapons did, how accurate enemies were, their reaction times, etc.
It allowed you to make the game as difficult or as easy as you saw fit in very specific ways. I always used it to create a "Realistic" difficult setting where Bond died in just one hit to the head or chest, or two hits to a limb. Same settings for the enemies, in addition to upping their accuracy to 70% and giving them quick reaction times. I got to choose my fun. That's the kind of small thing that developers could throw in even with token development time.
Also, Goldeneye did something I wish more games would do. If you beat the game on the Hard setting, you unlocked an additional "difficulty" mode called 007. This was unique because it opened up the parameters under the game's hood, letting you tweak how much health you and enemies would have(separately), how much damage weapons did, how accurate enemies were, their reaction times, etc.
It allowed you to make the game as difficult or as easy as you saw fit in very specific ways. I always used it to create a "Realistic" difficult setting where Bond died in just one hit to the head or chest, or two hits to a limb. Same settings for the enemies, in addition to upping their accuracy to 70% and giving them quick reaction times. I got to choose my fun. That's the kind of small thing that developers could throw in even with token development time.
# posted by : November 24, 2009 5:45 PM
: November 24, 2009 5:45 PM
First, I don't think it's the game developer's business to punish or reward a player for choosing a certain difficulty level. We're all different - in skills and player preferences - and why should anyone else care what difficulty level I need or just prefer?
I'd be mad as hell at a game that penalized me for playing on "easy" (which is exactly the same as giving a bonus to playing on "hard"). And as "anonymous" noted, in some cases, the bonus actually makes the game easier. I've played games where you get less experience playing on "easy," therefore your characters don't advance as fast. THAT is what really sucks!
I must also disagree about handicapping the AI. If I play an RPG where the AI wastes spells casting Silence on fighters, I'm going to be pretty disgusted with the game - whether I'm playing on "easy" or not.
Heh, heh. In general, I guess, I disagree with your entire post. I think that difficulty levels work pretty well by just increasing/decreasing attack damage and hit points. Your "bonus" for playing at a harder difficulty level is that the game is more enjoyable for you at that level (or for bragging rights, for the hopelessly immature). And that's the same "bonus" ALL players get, at whatever difficulty level works best for them.
PS. For the record, I almost always play games on the normal difficulty setting, except for some "real-time" games, since I suck so badly - so very, very badly - at "real-time" combat. But I HATE when a game developer tries to force me to play a game HIS way - no saves or inconvenient saves, penalties for easier difficulty levels, only ONE way to complete a quest or solve a puzzle, no gamma adjustment (to force a player to stumble around in the dark), etc.
I'd be mad as hell at a game that penalized me for playing on "easy" (which is exactly the same as giving a bonus to playing on "hard"). And as "anonymous" noted, in some cases, the bonus actually makes the game easier. I've played games where you get less experience playing on "easy," therefore your characters don't advance as fast. THAT is what really sucks!
I must also disagree about handicapping the AI. If I play an RPG where the AI wastes spells casting Silence on fighters, I'm going to be pretty disgusted with the game - whether I'm playing on "easy" or not.
Heh, heh. In general, I guess, I disagree with your entire post. I think that difficulty levels work pretty well by just increasing/decreasing attack damage and hit points. Your "bonus" for playing at a harder difficulty level is that the game is more enjoyable for you at that level (or for bragging rights, for the hopelessly immature). And that's the same "bonus" ALL players get, at whatever difficulty level works best for them.
PS. For the record, I almost always play games on the normal difficulty setting, except for some "real-time" games, since I suck so badly - so very, very badly - at "real-time" combat. But I HATE when a game developer tries to force me to play a game HIS way - no saves or inconvenient saves, penalties for easier difficulty levels, only ONE way to complete a quest or solve a puzzle, no gamma adjustment (to force a player to stumble around in the dark), etc.
There's a crucial distinction to be made here.
Since most players will play on Normal, and most of those won't finish the game, you don't want to skip any content on Normal. Why make extra levels / enemies if 90% of players don't see them? So successful games on Hard take a different tack that doesn't eat up many extra resources:
Halo adds better AI
Goldeneye adds objectives
Devil May Cry levels up enemies to their late-game versions
However, on Easy mode, it's OK to say, This part is really tough and we're going to skip it because you're playing on Easy. Music games are really good at doing this. (I wish God of War had done it too!)
Since most players will play on Normal, and most of those won't finish the game, you don't want to skip any content on Normal. Why make extra levels / enemies if 90% of players don't see them? So successful games on Hard take a different tack that doesn't eat up many extra resources:
Halo adds better AI
Goldeneye adds objectives
Devil May Cry levels up enemies to their late-game versions
However, on Easy mode, it's OK to say, This part is really tough and we're going to skip it because you're playing on Easy. Music games are really good at doing this. (I wish God of War had done it too!)
There was TimeSplitters 2 that I played on the PS2 which had an interesting take on difficulty: When you did a level with higher difficulty, the level was bigger. You had more things to do, and suddenly, walls in Normal became doors in Hard with an entire layout behind, more enemies to kill, items, and such.
I liked that.
Sadly, I was just unable to play it correctly with a pad. With mouse and keyboard, I would have redone everything in Hard...
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I liked that.
Sadly, I was just unable to play it correctly with a pad. With mouse and keyboard, I would have redone everything in Hard...
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