Difficulty in games

Multiplayer I can totaly see it, both in terms of the feel of guns and movement - although I’m not a fan of losing the precision of toggling cover and going back to auto-cover. Single player though, not being able to order your squad around and tee up combos is a major step back in my book. But it’s also question of whether you prefer your squad selection to be more important, or your player character. Given that so much of Mass Effect’s appeal is the party members, I think it it’s a shame the combat loop de-emphasizes them, but I guess it also makes it easier to bring your favourites along even if they’re suboptimal.

Combat is not my problem with Andromeda though, those are structural and narrative.

(Although I think even Mass Effect 1 had a better take on cover-based shooting in an open world context: Don’t. Here, have a tank instead.)

I love JRPGs, too, in part because of this, but the problem is that most of the time it scales just a bit too equally between you and your foes. I LIKE that I am fighting tougher enemies and that I am getting stronger in the process, but in a lot of JRPGs, because the difficulty isn’t that high to begin with, it really makes no difference in combat except for in those rare JRPGs where difficulty is high enough that you actually need to use your full range of abilities (offensive, support, defensive). Also helps to have enemies with varying weaknesses so that you don’t always spam the same tactics.

But I am the same way regarding sucking fucks at games. It’s why I never play the trophy or gamerscore game or try to unlock extras. The only high difficulty game that frustrates me but keeps me playing is Dark Souls…and I am still nowhere near finished and probably never will finish it.

Keeping useful and FUN stuff behind difficult unlocks is an additional element of gameplay I know many others enjoy and does enhance and prolong the experience, but not a big fan when it takes whole other levels of skill to unlock those extras than is required for the rest of the game.

Wanted to add: another issue with JRPGs and some Western RPGs is that the idea of difficulty is solely increasing HP. So the only difference between engaging a lowly bandit and a mighty dragon is the amount of time it takes to take down, not necessarily that the battles are tougher and require actual skill or tactics.

I’m not a huge JRPG fan, but those I’ve played I think actually do a good job of things like this:

Western style games have also done a much better job of this lately, Divinity: Original Sin being a really good example. Things might -seem- straightforward, but often it is not. And so you end up doing a lot more tactical fighting, which is a thing I personally love in an RPG. Beyond problem solving for quests, you also problem solve per enemy fight. It ups the reward feeling you get from success.

I can’t believe this is true. If you’re holding you’re controller in the right direction and you can press a couple of keys at a time in order to do some kind of maneuver, you’re better than you think you are.

I enjoy games that unlock stuff as you progress. They just shouldn’t make you be the master of all their special combo moves to do it. Unlocking characters in Street Fighter was fun, not sure if they still do that, haven’t played in forever, and getting a new car was awesome too. Unlocking Super Mario Kart stuff felt super rewarding too.

Here is the sum total of any point I’ve ever made on the issue, copied from the other thread:

Incentivizing difficulty is an important element of game design for anyone who appreciates the process beyond “hey, it’s fun to kill/craft/level up stuff!”.

I am astonished that anyone would take issue with this. Perhaps I’m to blame for not being clear enough, since you and @Rock8man seem to think I’m claiming something else.

Well, maybe. Sometimes that’s true. For some games. I’m not sure what this has to do with my point. But I am sure you would be terrible at modern* game design. Don’t quit your day job! Game design is the art of enjoyable frustration. You have to balance both the enjoyable and the frustration, but you seem to be suggesting they’re the same thing.

-Tom

* not necessarily the same thing as good game design!

Someone I was talking to about this issue once told me “play, and mastery of play, is an intrinsic reward.” So what if the tactical layer is removed?

-Tom, who doesn’t actually mean what he just wrote, in case that’s not clear!

Here’s a thought that I’ve had bouncing around in my head for awhile: I can think of at least two different approaches to difficulty, which are also different approaches to games more generally. I think of these as the “risky victory” scale and the “guaranteed victory” scale. You could also call these the “high risk” approach to gaming versus the “high achievement” approach to gaming.

What I mean is this: for some gamers, a game is not a meaningful experience unless there is a real risk of losing/dying/facing a serious setback of some sort. One shot kills add excitement. Perma-death amps up the intensity. Bosses that use the player to scrub the floor tiles get the blood pumping. I can, in a remote kind of way, sort of grasp that attitude; it is pretty common.

However, to me that’s all crazy-town. I want the challenge to be in figuring out how to win, and once I do that, I want to powergame the crap out of the game and win every damn time. I want perfect victories. I want predictability, not highly random damage spikes etc. I’m probably an extreme case of the “high achievement” or “guaranteed victory” type gamer, but I’m not alone.

I think a lot of the inability to communicate on this issue stems from the fact that a lot of gamers are looking for fundamentally different things in terms of experiencing a game, and have a very different definition of “difficulty”.

I don’t really have a lot of consistency with difficulty settings, I mean I’m all over the place. I went through Halo Reach on legendary by myself, I beat Witcher 2 on dark, and all the Mass Effects (except Andromeda, yet) on insanity. Partly it’s because I’m curious, wanting to test myself. Partly it’s because there’s achievements involved. But I think a big part of it is I just didn’t feel done with the games, and wanted to spend more time with them, so I figured I’d try stepping up the difficulty. But more often than not, it’s just normal difficulty for me, and occasionally I’ll bump it down to easy if I just can’t be bothered.

I’m saying it’s fine to put some of tools of balancing that in the hands of player. People are different, and especially in games that are dependent on reaction times and hand-eye coordination, have different physical capabilities, so they’re going to experience different levels of frustration by the same content.

I’m also an old fogey who thinks it’s weird for people to need a meta-game structure like achievements to engage with a game’s difficulty settings. You’re here to experience that enjoyable frustration. Why wouldn’t you try to play with your game and find where it’s most enjoyable?

(Granted, it’s not as easy if you can’t adjust the difficulty on the fly. Having to start over to change difficulty is rubbish, unless that’s a thing you’re going to do a lot of anyway.)

Well, yeah, of course. Diablo 3, Agents of Mayhem, and Halo put the risk/reward calculus in the players’ hands, and those are some of the tools of balancing. The difference is that Mass Effect puts all of the tools of balancing in the player’s hands. It opts out of the process altogether.

In other words, it suggests you “try to play with your game and find where it’s most enjoyable.” According to Bioware, “play, and mastery of play, is an intrinsic reward”.

I’m not trying to take your words out of context, but I’m having a hard time squaring your (spot-on) complaints about Mass Effect with your insistence that I’m wrong when I say that incentivizing difficulty is an important part of game design.

-Tom

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point over the years, I decided to always, ALWAYS start new games on the lowest difficulty. This allows me to learn the game mechanics easily, hopefully with the least amount of frustration. If I decide later that it is too easy, I’ll upgrade the difficulty. But, I must say that the desire to replay a game on a higher difficulty after playing on the easiest is extremely rare. DOOM, Thief, and Disciples 2 are the only games that I recall doing this with, but there are probably more. If I find a game too frustrating, confusing or difficult on the easiest difficulty, I am firmly convinced that it is “not for me” and can comfortably move on to the next game in my ridiculously obese backlog.

I’m pretty sure ME2 was made the way it was difficulty-wise because otherwise there would be a lot of complaints about bullet sponge enemies from people and reviewers who wanted to play it as a straightforward shooter.

I guess it comes down to expectation and a lack of transparency? When you raise the difficulty, you expect the enemies to be smarter, more aggressive, have more hitpoints, and do more damage. And Mass Effect 2 does all of those things. What you don’t expect is the battlefield dynamics to fundametally shift because everything now has at least one layer of protection and what was previously trash that could be easily kept in check by crowd control abilities now shrug it off until you break that protection.

I’m fine with picking the difficulty and setting my own challenge level as long as I can make an informed choice.

But one of the reasons I can usually make that choice is because I’ve played a ton of games and have developed a gut feeling for how difficulties work and where the most enjoyable friction for me is. And one of the areas where I think you’re correct and this kvetching isn’t comparable to some of your really absurd takes* is that to really be informed, you should experience the game’s baseline before you have to make a choice. Plus, every game could be someone’s first. And yes, dynamic difficulty with different rewards (even if I personally didn’t care about them) á la Agents of Mayhem is a very clever way to engage with this.

Where I draw the line line though is Achievements. Bioshock 2 does not become less brilliant if it’s released on GOG without hooking into its achievement framework. That is just nonsense.

*People didn’t know how to make movies until the 70:s. Now that’s indefensible.

One element here is transparency and player options. I would like at least the option to access deeper information about play options and difficulty levels. Tell me exactly what the difficulty does. Maybe not up front but something I can click for more detail if I want to see the sausage being made.

One of my favourite games of all time was Railroad Tycoon 2. How it handled difficulty was one area that I have only appreciated after this discussion.

The game’s difficulty was broken down into three distinct areas. The first area was the industrial model that dictated how goods were supplied and demanded on the map. The easiest difficulty meant that all goods were produced from all industries. It didn’t matter if a steel mill had no coal, it would still produce steel at a set amount every year. The moderate difficulty turned on the production chains and requirements for goods to be supplied. If there was no coal and no iron, then there was no steel produced, and one single steel mill could receive as much of those prerequisite goods as it liked. Finally, the highest difficulty enacted a series of soft caps to demand. That one steel mill might only accept 6 car loads of coal each year, continuing to saturate it with coal will drag the price of delivery down. At the same time, a feature was finally unlocked that allowed a player to purchase the industry. Not only did the hardest industrial option promote smart play, it also rewarded it with extra income every year.

The economy model (stock exchange) did something similar. I’m a little more hazy on the details, but if I recall, easy difficulty allowed purchase of only the company’s stocks making it impossible to be bought out. (ie: lose >50% share in company). Moderate difficulty allowed the purchase of own and rival company shares and the hardest difficulty gave the greatest power in the share market by opening up the ability to buy on margin and short sell.

The hardest difficulties deliberately gated away the advanced tools that rewarded good gameplay. In conjunction, the player and AI had bonuses and penalties to their income based on difficulty. It was also possible to set up a custom difficulty. Maybe I like the advanced industrial stuff but didn’t like the share market? Well I can set advanced industrial model and moderate share trading. The AI wasn’t particularly great, especially when a depression would hit thanks to it only linking towns and cities, I could up the challenge by taking a bigger hit to my income and letting the AI have a greater bonus. Railroad Tycoon 2 managed to achieve difficulty in games in an intelligent manner.

Homeworld 2 had dynamic difficulty, and it sucked.

@Strato, I have bounced off the Railroad Tycoon series of games repeatedly over the years (Transport Tycoon was always more my speed), but your post has me desperately wanting to play the game you just described. Very cool!

It bears remembering that Railroad Tycoon 2 is a product of its time. It holds up ok but it can be a little infuriating. Also the difficulty options only apply to the scenarios. The campaign has its own difficulty, but I think that only applies to revenue for AI and player. All the share market and industrial models are available.

In a sense, Transport Tycoon (and Open TTD) is a superior game because they are about one thing, and doing that one thing right which is production chains. So much so that mods (eg: FIRS) for OpenTTD really open the gates with production chains encouraging a playstyle that has smaller branch lines and road transport merging into a singular drop off depot so that goods can be taken by larger vehicles across the map. In this case, the game’s difficulty is increased due to the industry model, pooling together primary resources to then feed into larger manufacturing industries and ensuring main line freight doesn’t get congested.

I could write a book about the problems KOTOR2 has with difficulty, as you’d expect from a game that’s released half-finished, but there’s one in particular that I want to point out.

If you turn up the difficulty setting, it gives a big bonus to enemies’ saving throws. That makes your force powers, grenades, and special abilities on your weapons useless. It robs you of most of the choices you might make during combat. All you can do is sit back and watch as your party make their standard attacks each turn until the battle is over. Besides being bad gameplay, it takes away the best parts of a Star Wars game. I don’t get to be a Jedi knocking a room full of guys on their asses with the force or a wily assassin droid picking just the right time to unleash some instrument of destruction.

In a fantasy setting like Star Wars, if you want to turn up the difficulty, don’t cripple my character. Make the enemies more deadly.