Just What is Good Difficulty Anyway?
- Kartik Tiwari
- Jun 13, 2020
- 5 min read
Blog - 3
The fairly recent ‘Easy Mode’ discussion for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice got me thinking about ‘good’ difficulty in games, How hard should a game really be? Should a game even be hard? For now, I am going to keep accessibility aside since that’s the most obvious reason why games shouldn’t be too hard at all(it’s also a huge topic which deserves a whole blog to itself) and focus mainly on the development side of things
Difficulty Levels
As more and more people play games, it gets harder (pun intended) to determine how hard a game should be made from the developer’s point of view.
I still think presenting the player with a difficulty choice before the start of the game is very shortsighted especially when the player can’t change it later on. The player can’t possibly know their skill level before even starting the game.
Having changeable difficulty certainly helps in this case, but it’s still not enough. Having an ‘Easy’ ‘Normal’ ‘Hard’ difficulty options may make the player be faced with a dilemma because of the toxic nature of these words, Easy and normal in their own minds might mean that they’re too inept to play the hard mode, but when they play the hard mode which is usually much harder than what they anticipated they might stop having fun altogether.
It’s our responsibility as designers to ‘try’ to find the right balance (I say try here because we can’t possibly determine exactly who will play our game and what their skill level is).So, how can we go about trying to prevent the player from facing such a dilemma? The easiest way to do this is: -
Difficulty Naming Conventions
Some get this right, some get this wrong. Some Examples:
- Rise of the Triad had its difficulty tiers as follows.
I understand that it’s satirical, but the last thing we want to do is to fuel the toxicity that’s usually associated with the difficulty levels in the gaming community and condescend the player for choosing a certain difficulty.
- Wolfenstein: The New Order
Same case with Wolfenstein’s difficulty tiers
- There are certainly better ways to go about this too, Like Celeste which is supposed to be quite challenging.
(Celeste Assist mode, n.d.)
It’s always nice to see developers being honest and inclusive.
- John Kane a Sydney based game designer also suggested a much better way of naming difficulty tiers
Having ‘Easy’,’Normal’ and ‘Hard’ sits in the middle of these 2 extremes of the spectrum, but just changing the name of these modes makes it so much easier for the player to choose the kind of experience they want to have in the game, it may also avoid the toxicity altogether in a larger scale if more games started implementing this.
Should a Game Even be Hard/Difficult?
Difficulty is not to be confused with challenge, I believe every game should have a challenge, A challenge is an obstacle that has to be overcome in order to progress the game. Even the easiest games have challenge in them, Kirby’s Epic Yarn is an excellent example, it has challenge, it has progression, and it’s a very easy game (In Fact,According to ranker.com it’s one of the easiest games) ("The Easiest Video Games To Complete", n.d.)
So, does every game need to be hard/difficult? Not at all, if we consider games like Journey or walking simulators like What Remains Of Edith Finch, those are successful games that aren’t hard at all. Considering the MDA framework published by Robin Hunicke , Marc Leblanc and Robert Zubek("MDA framework", n.d.), these games fall into the category of ‘Discovery’ and ‘Narrative’ Aesthetic respectively. So, it really depends on the market, the target audience’s motivation and the creator’s vision - if the game should be difficult.
Just What is Good Difficulty?
So long as the player gets the feeling that the game is being fair on them and not actually punishing them they will be motivated to play the rest of the game. Daniel Butros says that the illusion of fairness is more important (Butros, n.d.), which comes in many forms for example, Health packs and ammo packs, Checkpoints, Solid visual and communicative feedback informing the player of what they did wrong etc. We as designers cannot possibly design a game that’s completely fair since that depends heavily on what the player does and we have no control over that, but we can certainly try to think of the aforementioned mechanics.
As Daniel Butros said in his blog,
"A player must always feel like the failure of a challenge is entirely his own responsibility, and not a fault of a poorly designed product."
"The player must understand how and why he failed, so that he can learn from his mistake and increase the feeling of failure being his responsibility."
If the player knows what went wrong, they can learn from their mistakes and do better next time. When they do, it gives them a feeling of elation and achievement.
However,Just scaling up enemy health and damage may not be enough to make the game difficult in a good way. So many games fall victim to this age old idea that ‘more damage + more health = more difficult’.
“The best difficult modes in games tend to share the same formula for upping the difficulty, which is contextual to the level portion. Sometimes this involves more enemy spawns, and most of the time there's additional damage-and in some places, less ammo.”
If the AI changes behaviour (which can be easy to conceptualise but very hard to implement) it adds a whole other layer to replayability in games.
For example,The Devil May Cry series does difficulty in many different ways. Most notable and interesting being; The Heaven Or Hell mode introduced in DMC 3, where the player and the enemies all die in one hit; The Must Style mode only available in DMC: Devil May Cry: Definitive Edition, where you cannot damage enemies unless your style rank is S or higher. ("Difficulty Mode", n.d.)
Play testing helps a lot in scenarios like this, If we need to have multiple difficulty levels, we should try to play each difficulty mode and isolate inconsistencies and unfair scenarios, so that we can tweak those things in the specific difficulty mode.
Going the route of From software’s ‘SoulsBorneShadows’ (Patent pending) also works as is evident from how beloved those games really are. These games however, are made by extremely talented people (and a lot of them) and From Software is one of the more successful studios out there and honestly, they can afford to make games for a niche audience.
However, for studios that are just starting out, I still think it’s a very good idea to make the game as inclusive as they can since that would mean more sales, plus it helps in making a good reputation with the consumers (not to mention it’s also a really nice thing to do!).
REFERENCES
- Git Gud Meme. (2019). [Image]. Retrieved from https://hugelol.com/lol/389549
- Rise of the Triad difficulty. [Image]. Retrieved from https://allthetropes.fandom.com/wiki/Idiosyncratic_Difficulty_Levels
- Wolfenstein Difficulty tiers. (2019). [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnmkA8uX3Sw
- Celeste Assist Mode. [Image]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/matt_roly/status/956493360641982464
- Tweet by John Kane. [Image]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/gritfish/status/934982014641487877
- The Easiest Video Games To Complete. Retrieved 29 July 2019, from https://www.ranker.com/list/easiest-games-to-100-percent-complete/ranker-games
- MDA framework. Retrieved 29 July 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDA_framework
- Butros, D. Difficulty is Difficult: Designing for Hard Modes in Games. Retrieved 29 July 2019, from https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132181/difficulty_is_difficult_designing_.php
- Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/from-dark-souls-to-this-is-sekiro-the-hardest-game-ever-made-1.839859
- Difficulty Mode. Retrieved 29 July 2019, from https://devilmaycry.fandom.com/wiki/Difficulty_Mode
- Devil May Cry 5. [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.humblebundle.com/store/agecheck/devil-may-cry-5
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