Difficulty levels in videogames

[Sean Hollyman]

I've noticed that different types of videogames handle difficulty in certain ways.

Part of the fun of playing action games like Devil May Cry on a higher difficulty is enemies changing tactics, doing more damage and taking a lot more skill to beat, there's a real sense of satisfaction from mastering it. Rather than just making enemies do more damage and having more health they actually change it up to keep things fresh.

In games like Fallout everything's just a fucking bullet sponge.Shooting is so clunky it just becomes about how fast you can sluggishly shuffle from side to side and pump as many healing items as you can and I don't really get anything out of it. Maybe some people get a kick out of it but I sure don't. Really not sure what else they could do in increasing the difficulty though, apart from hardcore mode.

What is your preferred system of difficulty increases in games?

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

The more options the better, ALWAYS. Sports games would really be unplayable without a slew of sliders to customize the game just the way you want it. I just got done playing the Dishonored 2 standalone DLC, Death of the Outsider, and the game allows for a custom difficulty with a slew of options. For example, you can alter the AI's ability to perceive above them, you can alter how much leaning affects your visibility, you can have the AI attack faster or slower, make it so the AI can attack all at once when in a group, and so quite a bit more. Some buffs to the AI do make it harder like them all attacking you in a group while I shortened how long they search around because that just makes the player wait longer if they need the AI to get back to normal patrols for whatever reason. Devs make all these variables and have toolkits to change lots of stuff on the fly, there's no reason not to give players most of these options because the work was already done, just add-in one more menu interface with sliders/options and that's it. Unfortunately, most devs just give us the bare minimum where difficulty levels just alter health and damage basically. That is at least something and can be useful when "normal" isn't balanced well. Horizon Zero Dawn is too easy on even Hard mode (and they added in an Ultra Hard in a patch) so it's good that there was at least an option for the game to not be super easy.

 

[Ravenbom]

As I get older and have more disposable income, less time, more time to wait for Game of the Year editions... I really pay less and less attention to difficulty other than to *gasp!* lower it so I can finish a game.
I replay games less than I did as a kid because I already have a shame pile of games to finish on each platform I own. So I don't often raise difficulty.

Ideally, I would like difficulties to scale in complexity and faux AI instead of just health and armor though. I do like difficult games, but when I realized the difficulty in Alien Isolation is mostly just the invisible patrol zone around you getting smaller or larger, it broke the game for me.
Also, the way XCOM2 used countdown timers to ramp up the panic and difficulty kind of ruined the game for me. XCOM was about making the best choice of bad choices (especially in the expansion) and XCOM2 uses timers so you really don't have a choice.
If they wanted to make it play more like an action game, they should have put in Heartstone style turn timers where once you select movement or action or only have 30 seconds to finish that team member's turn and decide to shoot, who to shoot, reload/heal/special/etc. Mark Brown of GMTK has a good breakdown of why XCOM2 didn't play as well as the first game.

I love that Dark Souls has hidden systems of difficulty. For instance, activating your humanity allows invasion which eliminates the need for AI since it allows real people to invade your single player game when you're 90 hours and balls deep in the run to the next bonfire.

I would say that Horizon Zero Dawn is the only game in recent memory I would really criticize for being too easy on normal. I was OK with that and still put 80 hours into finishing everything.
If you grind any RPG, they get too easy, but I would say that games like Fire Emblem have a problem with the highest difficulties because they promote only one strategy: rally bots. (You can ignore rally until lunatic difficulty where it's like gaining a couple levels for one turn)
So @ OP - it's great if the difficulty promotes more playstyles but often, I have a problem because it usually funnels people into ONE playstyle.

Even venerable Dark Souls funneled everyone into Soul Level 120.

 

[CannibalCorpses]

I find games are too easy so i always play on the hardest setting first playthrough and it really annoys me that some games force me to play the game on normal before they allow me to get to the challenge. I don't mind if they up the HPs of the enemey or if they give them bonus effects on the higher difficulties...i'll always find a way through without too much struggle.

For the most part though i get my difficulty kicks by aiming for the leaderboards and trying to get every trophy/achievement. Finishing games isn't a challenge anymore and hasn't been for a very long time...modern games are just too easy and all the options they give you to do things only lessens the difficulty.

Thief had an interesting difficulty approach with the player needing to steal more items before they can finish a level and not being allowed to harm anyone. The newest one had all those custom options but they didn't really make the game any harder...just made the couple of boss sections more precision based and irritating.

Fallout does have a bullet sponge feel to it but only if you advance your character badly. If you go for pure damage upgrades and equipment upgrades as early as possible then for the most part the only struggles will be tough legendary types and they can be mitigated by finding a shotgun with an explosive effect or using one of the vastly overpowered melee weapons. I'll also add Skyrim to that list because it is the same as Fallout but more easily broken with clever use of crafting items and potions on an exponential scale to the point that you can one shot anything in the game with the weakest weapon type and no skill.

 

[Sean Hollyman]

Difficulty menus are better for some games than others (mostly fighting and sports) but for most genres usually Easy>Medium>Hard>Ultra Hard etc. only involve arbitrary sliders like damage taken, damage given, ammo count, availability of pickups, etc.

It all adds up to a big ?Meh?.

I?d rather have difficulty more intrinsically woven into the game itself. Having to pick a difficulty right off the bat is an immediate deterrent to my enjoyment. I shouldn?t have to think about what they mean or how much and in what ways the differences will be affected depending on what I pick. Being able to change it whenever also does little to alleviate the dissonance it causes in my mind.

 

[Xprimentyl]

Difficulty menus are better for some games than others (mostly fighting and sports) but for most genres usually Easy>Medium>Hard>Ultra Hard etc. only involve arbitrary sliders like damage taken, damage given, ammo count, availability of pickups, etc.

It all adds up to a big ?Meh?.

I?d rather have difficulty more intrinsically woven into the game itself. Having to pick a difficulty right off the bat is an immediate deterrent to my enjoyment. I shouldn?t have to think about what they mean or how much and in what ways the differences will be affected depending on what I pick. Being able to change it whenever also does little to alleviate the dissonance it causes in my mind.

Agreed, I prefer games without difficulty levels. And no, this is not me contradicting myself in other ?threads that shall not be named? wherein we discussed (read: ?shit-flung?) Easy modes and skipping bosses and I was ?pro-choice? as it were, preferring (moreso ?indifferent towards?) those options for a more inclusive experience over an exclusionary ?git gud or get out? one. Like you, I personally dislike having to arbitrarily determine upfront if ?Normal? is where I should start or if ?Hard? is a manageable challenge without ever playing the game or worse, without knowing what changes between the different levels. I?d much rather a game be what it is and either I get it or I don?t.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Better AI. Always, but always better AI. (And extra objectives, Perfect Dark styley)

An addition I think worth mentioning, is Horizon Zero Dawn's 'ultra hard' mode, which must be the only game have ever felt the desire to dive into such a thing, it basically mentions the AI are more aggressive, but one other detail that seems to have drastically improved the experience more than I ever expected was removing on-screen health bars of your enemies

at first it seemed like a hugely daunting, unwelcome change, as I personally had relied in the past so much on staring intensely at every creature's dwindling health bar to know what risks to take or what weapon is worth using in each moment. However, without that, now I very much prefer it this way as I find myself not being distracted by a little bar and instead focusing far more on the actual battle at hand; everything becomes more exciting and personal with each creature. It has legitimately improved my playstyle and enjoyment alongside immersion quite a lot, certainly not something I'd ever thought possible from any game's self-described 'ultra hard mode'

 

[Aerosteam]

The best implementation of difficulty choices I've seen is The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition's beginning, which is completely detached from the main game. You fight 3 waves of enemies of increasing difficulty, defeat none the game recommends Easy, 1 for Normal, 2 for Hard and all 3 for Dark (Very Hard) mode. It organically gives a difficulty setting for each player, which doesn't even need to be followed. Inexperienced players will likely get Easy mode, experienced ones or returning players will likely get Hard/Dark mode.

The section also acts as a tutorial for the game, so when the story kicks in it never halts your progress to teach you some control inputs.

This is so much better than the vast majority of other games when it comes to handling difficulty settings. Think about how often you get asked to select a difficulty setting before you even start playing the game. I'm like "I've never played this game before and you're already asking if I want an easier or harder experience."

 

[Ironman126]

In games like Fallout everything's just a fucking bullet sponge.Shooting is so clunky it just becomes about how fast you can sluggishly shuffle from side to side and pump as many healing items as you can and I don't really get anything out of it. Maybe some people get a kick out of it but I sure don't. Really not sure what else they could do in increasing the difficulty though, apart from hardcore mode.

They could make a competent fucking shooter, but that's asking a lot of Bethesda.

Since turning 15 what feels like a million years ago, I almost never touch difficulty sliders. I've yet to run into a game where the default wasn't fine. The only exception that I can think of is Mass Effect 2 and only because it was too weird to me that none of the enemies ever had shields, but Shepard and the squad have shields for days. So, not really for challenge, but for internal consistency.

Mostly, any difficulty change that I would want would be hardcore modes, a la Fallout New Vegas or Skyrim's Frostfall and Realistic Needs mods. Notably, they don't change the difficulty of combat. Metro 2033/Last Light also does something similar, but also makes everyone and everything take far less damage to kill. Kinda nice being able to down a nosalis with two bullets. Less nice when a flying nosalis brain scrambles you mid reload.

For a time, I thought I might like a lower difficulty setting in Stellaris, but then I realized that the game is actually just utterly broken and no change in difficulty would fix that.

 

[sXeth]

Difficulty Levels, the standard gamut of Easy-Normal-Hard-LOLWTFBRUTAL, are almost universally trash. There's a very very minimal number of games where they're semi-effective presets of more proper difficulty systems, but usually its a guarantee of some manipulation of the numbers up and down that will adversely effect the gameplay logic. The classic being health bars where you can have human people varying from dying by a grazing shot to the thigh, or taking 15 shots to the face,

Timers, as someone mentioned above, are another one I'd throw in the pile of mostly garbage difficulty mechanics. For any kind of strategic gameplay, its completely counter-intuitive (other then to potentially streamline a multiplayer session). They're also frequently married with the bullet sponge concept to create the DPS-check encounter, which is about the blandest gimmick you can have for a combat scenario.

Difficulties done well are those that make enemies react in clever ways to counter the player. Or situations that force judgement and application of alternate tactics and resources on a regular basis. There are ways to do those badly of course. Omniscient psychic guard AIs in stealth mechanics are an obvious bad and frequent case. The survival/horror genres are saturated with stuff that has inexplicable constraints on your resources that would fall into the latter, but is almost never kept congruent with NPCs or the environment.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I don't mind the extra options for the sake of replayability but honestly normal/medium/standard difficulty is good enough for me.

 

[ChaplainOrion]

Whenever I play a game, I set it to normal. I always felt that that is the difficulty designed for the game, or it should be, and that the other difficulties are permutations of that. To me, that seems like how games should be designed.

 

[Bad Jim]

Also, the way XCOM2 used countdown timers to ramp up the panic and difficulty kind of ruined the game for me. XCOM was about making the best choice of bad choices (especially in the expansion) and XCOM2 uses timers so you really don't have a choice.
If they wanted to make it play more like an action game, they should have put in Heartstone style turn timers where once you select movement or action or only have 30 seconds to finish that team member's turn and decide to shoot, who to shoot, reload/heal/special/etc. Mark Brown of GMTK has a good breakdown of why XCOM2 didn't play as well as the first game.

The way they should have fixed overwatch crawling was to change the mechanics to make it less of a dominant strategy, not to simply bully people into playing the way they wanted. For instance:

-When you discover aliens, you get a fair fight, but when they discover you, they get free shots because they have the initiative. So you will want to discover them before they discover you, which you achieve by moving around.

-Change the cover system to be more realistic. Cover actually gives you almost 180 degree protection, and protects you from a lot of angles where you'd expect to be flanked. Making it more realistic would make it easier to flank the enemy and your squad would in turn be more easily flanked.

-Another aspect of the cover system is that you have to be right behind cover to benefit. If you try to move forward but you can't quite get to cover it grants no bonus, even if that cover is between you and the enemy and should block some shots. Recognizing such cover would benefit the side moving forward without helping the side with an entrenched position.

-Ostensibly, when combat starts the aliens should call their buddies and any alien near you should attack. In practice, this might mean enemies randomly spawning on your flanks, but you would also be given several turns where no more enemies spawn, so you could manoeuvre freely.

Another thing is that Firaxis only really needs to affect the people playing on Twitch/Youtube. These are the players people watch when they are deciding whether to buy the game. They also include those who play Impossible difficulty that people watch and emulate when they want to improve. Since they are entertainers, they will prefer exciting, aggressive play so it only needs to be 1% more effective than overwatch crawling to get them on board. If Joe Nobody then decides to overwatch crawl anyway, there is no reason to stop him.

 

[Sean Hollyman]

Better AI. Always, but always better AI. (And extra objectives, Perfect Dark styley)

An addition I think worth mentioning, is Horizon Zero Dawn's 'ultra hard' mode, which must be the only game have ever felt the desire to dive into such a thing, it basically mentions the AI are more aggressive, but one other detail that seems to have drastically improved the experience more than I ever expected was removing on-screen health bars of your enemies

at first it seemed like a hugely daunting, unwelcome change, as I personally had relied in the past so much on staring intensely at every creature's dwindling health bar to know what risks to take or what weapon is worth using in each moment. However, without that, now I very much prefer it this way as I find myself not being distracted by a little bar and instead focusing far more on the actual battle at hand; everything becomes more exciting and personal with each creature. It has legitimately improved my playstyle and enjoyment alongside immersion quite a lot, certainly not something I'd ever thought possible from any game's self-described 'ultra hard mode'

I?d love to see more games designed like this, where damage dished out is physically represented by an enemy?s diminished ability to fight back. Horizon is great at this with its components system, and I remember MGS: Peace Walker had some bosses like this as well. Even a health bar game like Bloodborne has some specific damage types on some bosses that will affect how a fight plays out.

I?d like to see it taken a couple steps further though. Most developers have materials-based rendering for things like lighting and textures now, but the next logical iteration would apply the system to physics. I want more accuracy in terms of both visual and physical damage attributes for a given weapon, and have them make more tactical sense upon the target they come into contact with.

 

[ToastyMozart]

The whole damage scaling thing just makes most difficulty options a waste. Unless it does stuff like improve AI like you mentioned, or simply offers alternate modes of play (both sides do much more damage, EW2's Classic Mode, etc) most games would ultimately be better off without them.

I actually like Nintendo's super guide system a lot better than including easy modes: It offers an out for people who just want to skip through the challenge, and simultaneously motivates more driven players because the "coward box" is right there taunting you each time you fail, and you don't want that bronze star staring you in the face for the rest of the game.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

I tend to like everything on the "normal" difficulty cause that's the intended experience. If it's the kind of game where it gets deeper when you play it in a higher difficulty like DMC (it doesn't only make the enemies smarter, it actually changes the type of enemies you fight and gives you distinct and unique scenarios from the easier modes) I may try it but I don't typically end up doing that for most things I play. I also don't ever lower the difficulty cause if I am having trouble beating something in normal difficulty it's an indication I need to play better and not that the game is too hard. By understanding why I am having trouble, more times than not, I end up enjoying the game on a deeper level since through this understanding one can extract more depth from the game.

 

[Kyrian007]

I generally never change the difficulty level of a game. Wherever the devs set the default is generally good for me. I've tried upping the difficulty when there is new features (NV and FO 4's hardcore or survival modes)... but I generally wind up having less fun. Games really are designed for a default difficulty level and suffer when someone changes it.

 

[Jamcie Kerbizz]

The best implementation of difficulty choices I've seen is The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition's beginning, which is completely detached from the main game. You fight 3 waves of enemies of increasing difficulty, defeat none the game recommends Easy, 1 for Normal, 2 for Hard and all 3 for Dark (Very Hard) mode. It organically gives a difficulty setting for each player, which doesn't even need to be followed. Inexperienced players will likely get Easy mode, experienced ones or returning players will likely get Hard/Dark mode.

The section also acts as a tutorial for the game, so when the story kicks in it never halts your progress to teach you some control inputs.

This is so much better than the vast majority of other games when it comes to handling difficulty settings. Think about how often you get asked to select a difficulty setting before you even start playing the game. I'm like "I've never played this game before and you're already asking if I want an easier or harder experience."

Come to think about it, I have to wholeheartedly agree. Any other games that give you 'sample', gauge your ability before proposing difficulty (exception being games that taunt you after X amount of fails with 'you suck' mode unlocked etc.) ?
I also remember reviewers whinging about Witcher 2 being unfairly difficult and broken from the beginning, all the while they were not using provided mechanics (bombs and oils) to 'lower given fight's difficulty' and were playing on setting visibly over their skill level (clumsily controlled character).

Edit: BTW as an example of persistently bad difficult settings I'd point towards Civ series. They just pump early start advantages of AI to the point where you can't really explore or variate your early game. You just need to play catch up = means no wonders, no non-efficient 'risky' tech builds, no unconventional city placement. You just gotta fill that giant hole first and AI remains as dumb as ever.

 

[Lufia Erim]

Whenever I play a game, I set it to normal. I always felt that that is the difficulty designed for the game, or it should be, and that the other difficulties are permutations of that. To me, that seems like how games should be designed.

Wouldnt it be easier to design the game on hard mode and then, trickle down to easy? Because instead of adding mechanics yoi are removing them?

I know destiny does this for raids. And hard mode raids feel more organic because of it.