EHamilton said,

I’ve gotten away from thinking about “difficulty” settings as a linear scale, toward thinking of different types of difficulty. Ultimately the difficulty of a game is measured in terms of the *threat* it presents for failure (the consequence of death or some other punishment state), and the *frequency* with which failure occurs for an average player. Some games focus entirely on upping the threat (roguelikes with permadeath) and other games focus on upping the frequency (mmo’s where death happens a dozen times while clearing a new raid area).

The absolute difficulty is something that players have control over. You can just move to an easier area, whether its going up five floors higher in Angband, or switching to a raid instance from three patches ago in WoW. So that’s less important to build into a game.

Designers should focus on giving players to ability to select the *type* of difficulty (which you classify as play style), rather than the absolute difficulty. For example, in a game like Din’s Curse, I’ll usually turn up the “threat” difficulty options (like permadeath) but dial down the “frequency” difficulty options (like monster hp/damage). I prefer a game where death is rare and requires a major blunder – but genuinely deadly when it does happen. But given the much greater popularity of the mmo model, it’s clear that’s an unconventional stance!

I don’t see why small developers should ever shy away from providing more playstyle options. The market is small enough without imposing rigid opinions about the right balance of a punishment state’s threat vs its frequency.

Menigal said,

I kind of like the sound of Eschalon’s options. It would be more incentive for me to try them. I suppose New Vega’s hardcore mode is in the same vein, and I actually found myself preferring to play that way, but only because it gave me more of an experience, not because my companions died easier.

Usually I don’t care much about difficulty levels, as long as the game doesn’t get ridiculous about various forms of fake difficulty. Enemies are “hard” because they’ve just given them 50 billion hitpoints? I’ve worked out the pattern of the attack or the little puzzle to win, but need to repeat the process a dozen times? In those sorts of situations, or when they just got sadistic for some reason, I might look for an option to make things easier.

I don’t know how many times I’ve changed difficulty levels in an RPG. My first run through Oblivion I, foolishly, played a character in a fun way, so naturally got screwed by the level spawns and had to turn it down. Usually it’s only action games that I’ll set to easy, and then its generally because I just want to see the game finished and can’t bear through the gameplay, as I did with Bioshock.

Cheetah said,

It’s kind of funny you mention Eschalon, I had a bit of a mini-rant about it here :

http://notimetoplay.org/2011/05/03/configurable-games-anyone/

Its a good game that I really really want to like, but the combat is too brutal. It could use with some configuration, or maybe fewer stats or something. Maybe I’m just watering down my character’s stats too much because there’s just too many possibilities 🙂

skavenhorde said,

@Mc Teddy How about resistances. That’s what I liked about Diablo 2’s harder difficulties were that the enemies that I played before now had unique resistances that I had to compensate for. My poor ice mage did not know what to do the first time I went to the next level. Most of them were ok, but then I’d get COLD immune and that through me for a loop……What do I do now that I put all these points into ice? I figured out a way around that quickly (by choosing two patchs instead of just one) That also had it’s own brand of nasty as well.

That game kept throwing monkey wrenches into my builds and I had to compensate for them or die.

Brian 'Psychochild' Green said,

Actually, I just read Cheetah’s blog posting linked above, and I agree with that 100%. I just bought Eschalon: Book II on cheap steam sale, so we’ll see how it treats me. 🙂

Rampant Coyote said,

As I have more games than I have time to play right now, I have tried to ignore the Steam sale. I have not succeeded.

As to Cheetah’s blog – I’ve always felt that the strategy aspect of (traditional) RPGs was much like any form of gambling… it was about managing the random number generator. A good RPG will give you tools to manage / control the probability ranges to your liking… and will manage its own to avoid really unfair, un-fun extremes.

I ran into that a bit with Frayed Knights, too. I had to bend the probability curves far closer to the mean than I ever expected. While technically hitting a target 30 times in a row followed by missing him 20 times in a row is a perfect result for an attack with a 60% hit probability, it’s not much fun. Neither would be guaranteed exactly two misses for every five attacks. But something in-between the two extremes seems to be what feels fun and fair.

kalniel said,

Merge that with character design choices and greater rewards for defeating harder things though and you have a positive feedback loop in the most negative sense:

Skilled gamers, who would prefer a more challenging situation, might powergame their character builds because they understand the mechanics better. Making challenges easier without having to grind the character, in turn giving greater rewards that make the character even more powerful, reducing still further the challenge.

On the other hand, players who want an easier time end up making things harder for themselves.

That’s why levelling mechanics shouldn’t be confused with or used in place of game difficulty. The former is a character progression device, the latter is the out of character, player game difficulty.

Andy_Panthro said,

One of the best difficulty choices I’ve seen was on System Shock.

You had four sliders which could be moved from 0-4 (four being hardest difficulty). The four sliders were: Mission, Cyberspace, Combat and Puzzles. You could set the sliders as you wished, to remove combat for a more adventure-game feel, or to turn it into more of a shooter.

Personally, I tend to turn down difficulty if games are based on real-time combat. I just don’t have the twitch reactions to deal with such things, and prefer turn-based games. Even then, I will often play games on easier difficulty levels to finish them. If a game is good enough (or easy enough) I’ll want to return to it and increase the difficulty.