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.
Gems and Relics 