The Difficulty with Difficulty in Games
Despite how seemingly obvious the concept may be, there is actually a great deal of discussion about how difficult a game should be. Why should a game be hard if the goal is to get as many people playing as possible? The original purpose of having challenge comes from the arcade days of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Games weren’t even meant to be beatable by the average person, just to be interesting enough to earn a set amount of money. On the Pickford Bros. blog, Pickford remembers the break from this model with the first console game he made. The publisher simply requested that the game be winnable. Now games have to have a last level, Mario actually gets the right Princess eventually, and the game has a point where it finally ends. How do you balance the desire to have the player beat the game with the need to make that accomplishment satisfying?
Tailoring difficulty for a player’s enjoyment is a much tougher task than it sounds. The traditional method of counting quarters was a simple gauge of success for a game; you knew the game was fun because people were playing it. Now a developer has to factor in a huge number of variables. For starters, the players themselves don’t always know where they stand with a game. The easy mode for Devil May Cry 4 may be highly appropriate for someone new to the series, while easy in Bioshock is borderline boring for anyone even remotely skilled at games. Chris Bateman explains in a fascinating blog post how tricky this balance becomes even if you have the alternative of making the game adapt to the player. With adaptive gameplay, the best strategy is to lose a few times so the game makes itself easier. If the player gets killed too many times before they have learned how to play, by the time they figure it out and are ready for a challenge it’ll be too easy. Finally, there is the simple problem of some players enjoying difficulty more than others. Challenge and overcoming it is still a source of satisfaction for some people. Bateman ends the post with the lament that there is simply too little information for developers to really know if they’ve got the right level of difficulty for their audience.
Beyond balancing difficulty is the simple question of whether it serves any purpose in the game at all. Back at the Pickford blog, another article goes into the various game design options that let a player break down the difficulty at their own pace. Although these games still utilize difficulty to a certain extent, there is always a way out. In some games, you can just level grind until your characters can overpower a boss. Interactive fiction or puzzles rarely maintain their difficulty because you can always check for hints online. The origin of such accommodations in these games was to make sure that someone who enjoyed the plot would always be able to get to the end. After all, as Pickford notes, when you’re telling a story, getting to the conclusion is the reward, not overcoming a tricky boss fight. Using GTA 4 as an example, Pickford notes that keeping up both challenging gameplay and also having a compelling narrative then becomes problematic. We all want to know what happens to Nico at the end, but doing those last couple of missions over and over can ruin the pace of the story. They just become annoying. Where is our way out if we don’t care about the satisfaction of saying we beat the game? If we’re there for the experience, is any difficulty that stops it really appropriate?
Yet just because the difficulty is hard to get right doesn’t mean it can’t serve another purpose. What if we used difficulty in conjunction with the plot? A more organized approach beyond just making everything have more health or deal more damage. For example, going back to Bioshock, if you play the game on Easy, hunting the Big Daddy becomes a light affair. Yet that’s contrary to their role in the story as fearsome protectors, which you appreciate more in the higher difficulty settings. You don’t really get the full narrative experience if you play it on a low difficulty. If you play the game on Hard, a Big Daddy is a very difficult, strategic affair that can take several tries. Would it have been better, for the sake of the story delivering an experience, if the Big Daddy was still hard to kill even on Easy? The method seems to work in more free-form RPG’s like Fallout. If you pick a fight with a super mutant in that game, rather than talking your way out, it is always guaranteed to be an unpleasant exchange for you. That’s consistent with the story and the setting: the super mutants are extremely dangerous and poised to take over the West Coast. Yet in the couple of instances where the game forces you to engage in direct combat with them, it offers a lot of help to lighten up the exchange. What one game does and the other doesn’t is that they adapt the difficulty with the plot. A person who is represented as a badass stays a badass.
Such considerations of difficulty become even more prevalent as multiplayer becomes a huge feature in video games. Why develop a brilliant A.I. or carefully balanced difficulty system when players can just go online and fight real people? Rankings and choice of opponents give a player the same set of options that developers spend years developing themselves. It also lets them feel that sense of accomplishment that beating a tough game provides as well. In an article with ‘The Escapist’, Kieron Gillen muses that challenging games are quickly becoming the equivalent of ‘80s metal. They’re such an acquired taste and appeal to such a small group that they aren’t able to find a home anywhere except the underground scene. This seems like a loss in terms of what difficulty could potentially add to a game if there was a bit more thought behind it. The satisfaction of beating a difficult game or having the highest score will always be there for players. It cannot hurt to wonder what other uses challenge in games may have for creating a game experience.
Comments
I’d like to add a couple other points to the issues you’ve already listed.
First, difficulty settings should be fine-grained, rather than the coarse adjustments of “easy, medium, hard”. I always appreciated the way a game like “Myth”, for example, had five difficult settings that ran the gamut from tediously simple to excruciatingly difficult. Games should ideally let players choose how challenging the experience will be, rather than force them to play at the extremes.
Related to that, however, is the “because it’s there” effect. I have trouble playing games on anything but the hardest difficulty setting, because then I feel like I’m not playing the game as it is meant to be played. It takes away from the sense of accomplishment. On the other hand, most games settle for making the “hard” setting more annoying and capricious, rather than providing greater challenge.
Overall, though, I doubt there’s a satisfactory solution to this issue. I miss the way old games were so incredibly demanding, and how much it meant when I beat them. But to be honest, I rarely beat them. I played about seven or eight battles in “TIE Fighter” before throwing in the towel. The 150cc cup in the original Mario Kart asked a lot more of me than I was prepared to give. I like that games are not quite as sadistic now.
Comment by Rob Zacny — July 1, 2008 @ 12:42 pm
Thanks for the comment, I agree about not really knowing how they would fix this issue.
It’s odd, I started this piece as a gargoyle grind on what cultures like what levels of difficulty. Then I uncovered all these academic essays and debates and realized how tough it really is. We all have different levels of skill, we all like different levels of challenge, and making a game that makes everyone happy from the difficulty seems nuts if you think about it.
I threw out my artsy-fartsy suggestion of coordinating difficulty with the plot, but I don’t know if that’s a solution. Just because you make the boss in the Third Act with the peaking conflict tougher than the resolution battle in the Fifth Act won’t change the original problem. How do you make the difficulty appropriate for the experience when the players are so varied?
Comment by L.B. Jeffries — July 1, 2008 @ 2:21 pm
Yeah, great point! This really gets at the heart of the conflict between games and stories.
You may have come across this already, but Jenova Chen wrote a brief piece last year on this very subject: “Flow in Games (and Everything Else)” http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1232769&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=19434473&CFTOKEN=69987009
Figure 3 explains it beautifully, but this paragraph is good:
“In order to design an interactive experience for a broader audience, the experience cannot be the same for all players or users. [...] However, the designer’s approach is not as simple as populating the experience with choices. [...]
The best way for game designers to avoid these counterproductive situations is to embed the player’s choices into the core activities of the interactive experience.”
Comment by Peter — July 1, 2008 @ 5:53 pm
I’d be interested on your take on this ‘new’ difficulty mechanic where developers give you the option to increase and decrease a game’s difficulty as you play (God of War). Or in some cases skip past difficult segments of the game (Alone in the Dark). Not sure if this is just a scapegoat for lazy difficulty design or not.
Comment by Daniel Primed from Australia — July 1, 2008 @ 8:31 pm
Another game that I thought had an interesting dynamic approach to difficulty was <i>The World Ends With You</i>. In the game, you could:
-Decrease your character’s level between fights.
-Change the game’s difficulty setting between fights.
-Choose to chain more enemies.
Choosing to make the game harder resulted in better loot drops, faster leveling, etc. I thought this was a really interesting mechanic. It definitely gave me motivation to master the combat system and make the game as hard as I possibly could.
However, like Daniel, I fear that this system may have been a subtle way of distracting the player from an inconsistent learning curve.
Comment by Matthew Gallant from Montreal — July 1, 2008 @ 11:43 pm
@ Peter
Thanks for the link, I really liked her idea of creating a multi-path series of challenges where the player gets to pick what they’re in the mood for. Connecting it to the actual game instead of making it a sliding bar could keep the learning curve intact by constantly reminding the player that they are taking it easy.
@ Daniel
Funny you should mention <i>God of War</i>, that’s one of the few games I ever took advantage of the option. I got to the last boss, right at the third phase where you have to use that giant sword, and lost interest. The sword had different combos, timing, and basically meant learning how to use this giant weapon I’d never liked throughout the game. The sequel did the same thing.
That said, in the Bateman post I linked to he gives the design choice credit for letting the player keep playing when he finds out the game is too hard at the current setting. It’s a nod to the idea of narrative over gameplay…but I think Peter’s link opted for a better solution. It’d be nice if I could ramp the difficulty back up once the obstacle that was driving me nuts was over.
@ Matthew
Man…I really need to try that game. Didn’t <i>Oblivion</i> do the same thing with the difficulty bar? I like the feature in games, but it inspires such laziness in me that I might as well be cheating. Maybe if they only had 3 “Get out of the Battle” cards that could be used at anytime? Or maybe the <i>Silent Hill 2</i> approach, where it just asks me if I like puzzles or combat more.
The issue again is that the mood can shift and suddenly I don’t feel like fighting (particularly after the 4th or 5th try). Same goes for puzzles, I might be tired of the match-stick puzzle and just want to keep the experience going.
Clearly they need to get on top of the mind reading technology for games ASAP.
Comment by L.B. Jeffries — July 2, 2008 @ 5:33 am
I’m interested to see if there are any generational differences in gamers’ ideas of the right amount of challenge. How much do the early gaming experiences impact attitudes towards difficulty?
For example, how do players who cut their teeth on Battletoads, Final Fight, and The Legend of Zelda compare to those who got into games playing GTA 3, Halo, and Twilight Princess? And how many of those gamers who started out on the old games now prefer the difficulty levels of the new games? Similarly, how would a new gamer, experienced mainly in recent games, react to something like Ghosts ‘n Goblins?
*shiver* even mentioning that game gives me terrifying flashbacks…
Comment by Scott — July 2, 2008 @ 11:08 am
@ Scott
Why not open a forum on ‘The Escapist’ or some other site and ask them yourself? I mention that website because it has an amazing international community going. That, and I hang out there all the time.
Comment by L.B. Jeffries — July 3, 2008 @ 8:57 am
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Comment by PSP Games from USA — October 4, 2008 @ 7:57 am
Looks very fun.
Comment by High School Football Rankings — December 18, 2008 @ 8:49 pm
I thought GoldenEye N64 was a perfect balance of difficulty. I think today though, they make games really hard and hope that people buy game guides. To me that’s a scam and sux the big one. I’m using an n64 emulator to play GE n64 online!! Check it out!!
Comment by wireless security camera — February 18, 2009 @ 6:44 pm