09.06.07

The difficulty of difficulty

Posted in Game design, Games, The Nameless Mod at 14:50 by Jonas

It strikes me that difficulty is pretty hard to get right, but that as a general rule, customizability = win. Another thing which is made of pure win is when you can change difficulty during the game so you don’t have to restart if you pick the wrong difficulty setting.

One good example that comes to mind of the latter is Jade Empire for the PC which I mostly found adequately challenging on normal difficulty. There were, however, some fights where my proverbial arse was handed to me (proverbially), but this was quickly solved by temporarily turning the difficulty down to easy.

I got to thinking about this while playing Jedi Academy and being smacked around over and over by three dark jedi. I quickly figured out I had to kill the two supporting dark jedi while they were recharging their friend’s health, but even after hacking away at them with my lightsaber three or four times, they still were not dead (which makes you wonder what their armour was made of - pure cortosis!?). After losing that fight 6 or 7 times, I enabled god mode just to get through that damn fight. It’s a shame because apart from that, the game has been really well balanced with a nice smooth learning curve.

More importantly though, customizable difficulty is really great. Unfortunately you don’t find it in many games. I feel the least a game can do is tell you what the difficulty settings do, like in Hitman 4 where the effects of each difficulty level are listed in the difficulty menu. But even better is when it gives you a list of choices and you can tweak them to your liking. The best example I’ve encountered of this so far is Space Rangers 2 where you get a whole range of options including how favourable the merchants’ prices should be.

In TNM (woah I made it four paragraphs this time!), we have of course fleshed out the difficulty choices quite a bit. This is not least because we know most of our players will be DX veterans and will know exactly how to exploit every last flaw of the AI (and it has many flaws), so we had to do something drastic to challenge them properly. Our initial testing indicates we succeeded - Shane started his alpha playthrough on the maximum difficulty and has reported that the game so far is really hard. Personally, I customized a game with lots of enemies and plenty of player damage. It hasn’t been excrutiatingly difficult yet, but I would describe it as a moderate challenge - and of course, I know where everything is.

I remember Hotel Carone let you set how many cameras were active in the game, which was a pretty nice feature. I would like to see more options like this, where difficulty settings are tailored to the gameplay. In shooters, changing how much damage the player takes is usually fine, but in puzzle games, a special hint system like in Myst IV can be a great feature. And in RPG’s, there’s typically a ton of numbers you can tweak. Adjusting the competency of the AI in strategy games or in stealth games like Thief or Splinter Cell can dramatically alter the difficulty of the game in a really great, natural way.

It’s clearly worth spending time on because difficulty is so important in games. You want the game to flow. Personally I never want to play the same sequence more than three times. I don’t mind having to quickload if I mess up, but dying three times in the same location is annoying - I play games for the stories and the fun, not for the challenge, but feeling threatened is often crucial to the enjoyment of the story, so it shouldn’t be a cakewalk either (*cough* KOTOR2 *cough*). And I’m sure some players love having to play a boss fight 10 or more times before they can beat it, so that’s where customizability comes in. I’m happy we’ve apparently struck a good balance in TNM.

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