For the Challenge, Part II

Difficulty can, of course, be affected through programming as well as or alongside design.  Mario was programmed with hard limits on his jump height and the levels were designed accordingly.  There are some games where programming and design are complementary, and the result for the player is beautiful, lively physics.  The design and the programming tend to be set in stone for games – especially the latter – and that’s a good thing!  You need consistent ground rules in order for your game to be considered as, well, a “game.”  But when some elements are static, like the programming, other elements are often demanded to be dynamic, like the difficulty.

The most classic example of what I mean by “dynamic difficulty” can be found in the presence of multiple difficulty settings/modes in a game.  Easy, medium, hard – or if you’re feeling creative, “Kid Mode,” “Impossible,” “I am Death Incarnate!”, and so on.  They’ve existed for a long time, often as adaptive measures to player testing of a “baseline” difficulty.  The idea is that difficulty can be more flexible by tweaking certain parts of the game one way or the other depending on this setting.  This is more prevalent in games designed around complex stats and numbers – less so in platformers like Mario where player “stats” are as simple as failure upon taking one or two hits.

The problem is these tweaks are usually just that: tweaks.  Developers can easily program things like player/enemy stats to scale with the difficulty setting, but when they take this approach, every other aspect of the design is still operating under “normal mode rules.”  If you design a final dungeon with an arduous gauntlet of tough enemies, then double their stats as a hard mode condition, it’s unlikely that the difficulty of the same dungeon will remain well-balanced and tested.  Instead, it’ll simply take the player at least twice as long to complete a segment that was already balanced for a completely different pace – or else it’ll be unintentionally and incredibly difficult relative to the player character’s capabilities.  I mean, I’m convinced that oftentimes developers don’t even bother to test alternate difficulty modes at all, but that’s a little harder to examine and prove.

All joking aside, sometimes it’s painfully obvious that a game’s multiple difficulty levels are implemented more as an algorithm than a series of design changes or even tweaks.  Look at Fallout 3 or Skyrim.  When you slide the difficulty up or down, the only alteration you see is how much damage you deal and take.  Enemy configurations and dungeon puzzles remain exactly the same throughout.  The same as what they were when balanced for a “medium” difficulty (Fallout: New Vegas at least gets credit for introducing a “hardcore” mode that actually adds extra features and overhauls the mechanics).

I find this to be a slightly lazy solution to the difficulty “problem.”  What it really does at its ugly core is change the pace of a game, rather than the difficulty; you take twice as many swings at enemies, have to spend twice as long dodging them, and probably die a lot more.  Essentially, longer and more numerous iterations.  Like other fake difficulty, what this comes down to is a waste of the player’s time rather than a test of their skill or tactics.  I could seriously come up with some kind of fancy axiom… “the amount of enjoyment derived from a video game is inversely proportionate to the amount of control the player has over its pacing.”

A smarter way of adapting difficulty higher or lower might be changing enemy AI to not fall for the same tricks: a prime example would be the fighting game genre, where CPU opponents of higher levels will imitate correspondingly more complex tactics and reflexes.  Take level 9 CPUs in Smash Bros. games, which can destroy beginner players in much the same way a more experienced human opponent would: through better coordination of offense and defense.  Sure, you do often spend more time playing against a high-level AI than a low-level one, but the pacing is ultimately dictated by the skill of the player rather than the amount of bullets the enemy can absorb before going down.  If you practice a little more at Smash Bros., you’ll eventually be able to conquer an advanced AI (or human player) faster and faster as you adapt to the level of play.  If you practice a little more at Fallout 3, that irradiated mutant animal is going to sponge the same damage at the same rate no matter how much you wish it would die quickly.

But even stat changes can make for a more interesting challenge if balanced thoughtfully.  Look at Critical Mode in Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix.  Sure, enemies are programmed to deal out more damage, and the player’s max HP and MP gains are cut in half, but at the same time the player does more base damage and starts out with more abilities and ability points.  This results in a real dynamic difficulty where ultimately the player can take their time with cautious play to offset increased risk, but also apply skill and knowledge of the mechanics to actually complete the game faster.  In other words, the game rewards a higher difficulty with a potentially more streamlined pace.

But you’d better believe it took more thought to implement Critical Mode in Final Mix than “Very Hard” mode in Fallout 3.  There simply isn’t a shortcut to well-designed difficulty.  It bears repeating: simply making gameplay take longer does not make it more (legitimately) difficulty.  The whole experience has to be fun for the player in exchange for (and in proportion to) the extra effort.  Even if that requires a little extra effort.

For the Challenge

I think a lot about the concept of difficulty in games.  Why can I be totally immersed in one difficult game when another just as totally turns me off immediately because of that difficulty?  What about that whole concept of “legitimate” difficulty?  When is it fitting for a game to be difficult, and when does it just ruin the experience?  It’s a huge aspect of what makes or breaks a game, and there are a lot of different angles to explore.  Here’s one of them.

It seems like a good chunk of the market these days has become geared toward “challenge” games, or maybe more accurately, “exercise in frustration” games.  Is it about the masochism inherent in the video game experience?  Exploiting a sense of nostalgia born from a perception of older “classic” games’ being less forgiving?  Simple appeal to every gamer’s desire for bragging rights and a sense of accomplishment?  I can definitely sympathize with these things, since I do love experiencing them myself.

The problem is that not nearly as many games as claim to hold this appeal do it well.

Take Dark Souls, for instance (because why not start off writing about video games by bashing a nigh-universally adored favorite).  The entire selling point of the game is how difficult it is.  Merciless and unforgiving.  Feed your inner masochist.  Relive the days when video games didn’t hold your hand.  Feel the ego boost when you finally defeat that boss.  The problem is that it tends to conflate “difficult” with “miserable.”

The game balance is tuned such that the player is on guard constantly, with even the lowliest enemies presenting legitimate threats.  Credit where credit is due, when you play Dark Souls you have to observe and adapt a lot.  Where I start to lose it is the point where the game discourages you from doing just that.  Exploration and experimentation are usually unnecessary risks because of checkpoint starvation combined with harsh consequences for dying.  But in a game where the tagline is “prepare to die!” it becomes questionable to punish deaths so severely.  If the expectation is that death is a normal and frequent part of the gameplay, that could be a really interesting opportunity to explore the concept of trial and error as a learning method.  Instead, the player learns early on that even though Dark Souls includes frequent deaths, it’s ultimately not designed around them any more than most other games.

Consider how in-game death is used in a “normal,” (i.e., not Dark Souls) game: as a deterrent, a way of saying “oops, you dun goofed.”  Given this usage, a well-tuned game will give you the knowledge and training to avoid a hazard consistently such that when you do meet it, you’re expected to react to it based on what you’ve already learned.  This is the entire foundation on which difficulty curves in games are traditionally built.  You know how to string together complicated jumps in world 8-3 of Super Mario Bros. because you worked your way up to them building on the skills you learned in world 1-3.  If you should fall down a pit, the game restarts you from the beginning of the level as a way of saying “come on now, bub, you should know better than to do that.”

Dark Souls can’t make up its mind on whether death should be avoided or embraced, though.  Again, the tagline is “prepare to die.”  That is entirely accurate, because right from the start, enemy stats and attack patterns make it clear that you’re in for it.  It’s also entirely inaccurate, because a good chunk of the game is spent with the player nearly paralyzed by the fear of losing all his progress and gained experience/currency as the consequence of that death.  If your game’s main method of teaching the player is also something to be avoided, what you’re essentially telling the player is “avoid learning.”  Put another way: when the entire point of the game is to be difficult, the player must be given the tools to adapt to it, whatever form they might take.

Let’s look one of those forms.  When you play Super Meat Boy, you definitely don’t expect an easy time of it.  Like Dark Souls, it’s gained a reputation for being tough as nails, and for killing its eponymous character liberally.  Unlike Dark Souls, however, those frequent deaths are an integral part of the design, and they work as a teaching tool because they don’t punish the player.  “You died on this insanely difficult passage?  No worries, there was a checkpoint about ten seconds ago.  Keep trying until you learn to do it right.”

It’s easy to think of checkpoints as “easifiers,” and the lack thereof as “challenge enhancing.”  But I would contend that not only do frequent checkpoints not lessen the difficulty of Super Meat Boy, but they encourage the player to keep plugging away at the more difficult portions without worrying about death as deterrent, and they allow the design to throw some nasty challenges at you.

Imagine how a change as small and simple as giving the player a checkpoint upon traversing pre-boss white mist would do wonders for the pacing of Dark Souls.  Bosses would feel so much more justified in the crazy offensive and defensive power they possess because their fights would be friendlier toward learning their patterns and capabilities.  As the game is, though, you don’t get to take another crack at a difficult segment until you recover your progress (and in the case of many bosses, take even more time on top of that to set up buffs, summons, and consumable items that you lost).  What part of that cycle is meant to encourage the player to keep attempting to meet the challenge?

Much of the good design present in Dark Souls is completely overshadowed simply by the omnipresent bad design of punishing the same trial and error it requires to progress.  But let’s be clear, this problem is present in more games than Dark Souls.  The otherwise excellent Terraria requires the player to complete a lengthy endgame quest to fight the absurdly difficult final boss who essentially requires several failed battles before victory can be achieved.  Many JRPGs such as Final Fantasy and even Paper Mario will require the player to traverse a good portion of a dungeon or sit through lengthy in-battle cutscenes following a death due to a boss attack that was literally impossible to anticipate.  The original Metroid respawns Samus with critically low health after death, prompting tedious farming for energy drops from enemies.

All of this amounts to a tedium, wasting players’ time on parts of the game that aren’t challenging rather than letting them spend it conquering the parts that are.  Much of this has to do with padding game length rather than deliberately trying to be punishing, but whatever the reasoning, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to view it as real difficulty.

The player should never experience fatigue while playing simply because he’s tired of the process of continuing from a failure.  If your main appeal comes from the challenge of your game, that doesn’t mean you have license to make everything obscenely difficult and ignore tuning it to the player experience.  The onus is actually even heavier on you, because the game at its core still has to be fun, and it still has to encourage the player to engage with it.

This is harder to do if your game is hard.  If you’re not up to the challenge, then, as the Dark Souls fanbase will universally tell you, “git gud.”