I’ve been looking at difficulty settings in games for quite a while now. Different games solve the problem of keeping difficulty entertaining for their players in different ways and clearly there is also a lot of nuance of what difficulty means for games of different genres and different styles and the audiences that game designers want to attract for their game. Clearly casual games on mobile phones have a different difficulty appetite than games in the AAA segment on consoles.
For a lot of AAA games and games that want to speak to a fairly broad market, designing the right difficulty is a challenge. It’s always a balancing act in between keeping the player entertained and giving them a challenge that they can overcome and therefore rewarding them with this positive feeling of achievement versus not making it too difficult so they can actually successfully progress without becoming frustrated versus making it too easy and the game becoming boring and running the danger of being called a walking simulator.
So it’s a fine balance that one needs to strike and some games offer difficulty sliders in the menu options, and in the beginning of a new game, that try and outline predefined settings for “Easy”, “Medium” and “Hard” and sometimes another for “Extra hard”, possibly unlocked after a first, successful run-through. This gives the player a choice and a starting point to define where they see themselves and what type of challenge they want to embark on with this game. And while that gives some more granularity than not offering a difficulty slider at all, it’s still not granular enough for most players to understand where on that 3-4 category scale (easy – very hard) they fit. Casual players will pick “Easy” over “Normal” and “Hard”, regular players will pick “Hard” over “Normal” and “Easy”. When you play from time to time, spent reasonable amount with different games and you might have collected experiences with other games but not this genre, or you have experience with this genre but you’re not an advanced player, then what do you do?
There is some stake in finding the right difficulty level early on but that choice is tied to and almost impossible reasoning. I can’t possibly know what “Normal” versus “Hard” means for a game that I have not played and I can’t possibly know what the designers intentions were, when carving out the difficulty categories for the slider. Are these categories that are meant to reflect general genre specific difficulty levels? Are these flavored or colored based on what the designers think the difficulty levels should be and if they want a fairly challenging game then that is tainted versus if they want a more casual game experience so that everybody completes it, “Normal” might mean something else in both of these cases. It’s hard to know and even a small tool tip that gives you an idea of what “Normal” versus “Hard” means is hard to map to information and experiences that I have collected previously.
Instead of sticking to a difficulty setting for all of the game or large portions of the game, there are a few alternatives that allow for fine balancing as the game progresses. As the player has their individual speed of picking up the game and their individual pace how they engage with the game and how fast they want to pick up some of the key mechanics, we could measure their individual “level”, and adjust. One way of allowing flexibility we already touched on, which is giving the option to change the difficulty in different sections in the game and not just in key chapters or at the beginning of the game, allows for fine-tuning specific sections of a game, overcoming a challenge and moving on.
You could also make the difficulty slider a little bit more intelligent in that we don’t let the user choose their difficulty themselves but based on progress we adjust the difficulty automatically, thereby allow ourselves some flexibility where there is leeway in the beginning and more challenging situations later in the game, catering for a natural proficiency and skill progressing players go through, as they learn mechanics, learn to read the enemy AI batter, get batter in battle.
We could also imagine that there is a few measuring points along the story to cross-check how far along the player progressed in their use of the mechanics, how well equipped they are with special items they collected, and whether their play level match what we expect at any given major point of the journey.
If the player level is matching with what we expected at this point, fine – if not, let’s adjust difficulty slightly – especially if the next boss is up or a more challenging passage is right in front of the player. We could also incorporate total play time of the main story in some of these calculations and when someone is fairly fast, we could assume that they are well progressing and therefore up for a little challenge.
A more detailed way of leveraging data points, and making the game more adaptive, would be to observe the player over the course of stretches of the game and then adjust difficulty based on the data that we collect about them playing:
- how they engage with enemies
- how well they have picked up some of the economic strategies
- how fast they progressed through some of the story
- how many enemies of a specific level they fought and won
- how well they are with the mechanics of fighting and defending
- If they have stalled a few puzzles along the game that give them optional gems
- how buffed they are really with “special” items and how well they’re using them.
- how often do they play and are there periods of not playing, indicating a drop off in skill or forgetting game mechanics?
Using the player’s data to adjust where they are in understanding and mastering the game and then fine-tuning it such that it’s still a challenge for them, could help fine-tune critical sections of the game, and adjusting for maximum enjoyment.
As for how long one measures the player’s sessions, that’s another, interesting questions that I haven’t thought about too much yet. This is certainly very game specific, and should be in line with how one assumes the game will be played. One should certainly cater for players that put the game aside for a few days and weeks, and pick it up again, possibly catering for a drop off in skill, or the player forgetting some mechanics and key combis, meeting them where they are.
All of this clearly has its boundaries and you only narrow down the window of too difficult versus too easy and fending off frustratingly difficult versus boringly easy so much. Players are very different and it will be hard to always find the right balance for every player in every section of your game. However, in a best case scenario, difficulty feels for everybody similarly, and the overall balance over longer stretches should feel right even if singular challenges or riddles feel easier or more difficult for some people some of the time. And when looking at difficulty and the motivational aspect of overcoming a challenge, it pays off to always err on the cautious side and not make a game too easy and rather try and incorporate optional clues and necessary flexibility for the player to try out different tactics, to overcome a challenge especially in battle. If the player cannot master a specific battle mechanic and they continue to lose a battle against a boss, allowing them to adopt different strategies and encouraging them to try different strategies out, this can positively influence their willingness to retry and their patience.
When we talk about “more difficult” we should also try to differentiate different categories of difficulty. While I may find a game difficult because I have to fight and battle, I might find it not too difficult but rather easy in passages where I need to jump and react very very very fast, because I know my controller controls and key combinations come easy to me.
As games are comprised of multiple different mechanics and a lot of different systems that interact with one another that can’t be combined in one, we should treat difficulty in a more differentiated way, and accept the multitude of skills and cognitive performance, players need to master to play games:
- There is battle difficulty, where the mechanics of fighting and defending might require the player to learn keys and key combinations to be successful. Potentially also to figure out the AI tactics to become successful. Doom Eternal is one example.
- There is Puzzle and Riddle difficulty, where to progress in the story unlock a specific key item or solve a side quest. The player needs to solve a puzzle by either combining multiple items or by interacting with the environment, arranging objects in a particular order, solve a dialogue quest or simply follow a path through specific locations, based on fuzzy information. Some of Zelda, some of Indiana Jones games fit in here.
- There is Platforming difficulty, where jumping and shooting require very exact measuring of distance and timing and keying the controls in a very exact manner. Super Mario Brothers and simple platformers fit here.
- Cognitive and Reaction difficulty is, where one finds oneself in a bullet hell and needs to punch in lots of controls in a very rapid succession, or perform combinations of keys to react rapidly. This is the Mortal Combats of this world, but also games like “Impossible Mission” fit here, but also Tetris.
- Exploration difficulty where there may be no map in the game and one needs to find key locations in an area; Consider a very complex dungeon that requires exploration first, that is designed to confuse the player with sub-levels and conflicting floor layouts or simply very subtle environmental storytelling that requires the player to deduct paths and hidden passages by reading the environment and deducting next steps. Dark Souls fits here, but also some of Metroid.
I’m sure that you will find more examples for each and every one of these categories and you will certainly find more difficulty categories as you look at your favorite games. I’m sure you will also find a number of games that fit a number of difficulty categories because they combine a multitude of gameplay mechanics and touch different difficulty aspects. These types of games usually would allow for a more fine-tuned difficulty game experience for players, because their power is that they can fine-tune difficulty in a more differentiated way and do not need to rely on a single slider that dials difficulty for everything up and down.
In a perfect world, we would acknowledge a game’s different difficulty categories and incorporate them in a difficulty setting that is both adaptive across the gaming experience by measuring key indicators that the player gives us through their progression of the game, so we can adjust, but also allows the player to indicate to us if they want a more challenging or a more relaxed gaming experience, giving us additional input what their personal preference is, independent of how they are performing and what they’re measuring.
Wow, designing game difficulty is hard!
FRICKELSOFT 