Difficulty levels in games

You seem to view difficulty levels as a form of progression mechanic, but that isn’t their function in most games.

I’m willing to bet tuning the game to work well on different level, so that each givess roughly the same experience, is much harder than declaring playing on Expert gives x1.75 XP, so the “Ha ha, lazy devs not doing their job” bit is kinda pointless.

By the way, I agree achievements are a good reward for playing on higher levels. It doesn’t affect gameplay, or make reasonable people do things they don’t enjoy, but players that are good enough get a nice pat on the back. Maybe they can print it out and hang it on the wall.

I think this is the part we have the most trouble understanding. If a game’s difficulty screen has a description like “this mode is for those who just want to experience the story and not worry about combat”, and another that says “this is the standard mode for most people and how they should play”, and another that says “this is for veterans of this genre and those that prefer more challenge”. Then how are they daring you to play the lowest difficulty by not having incentives in the higher difficulty? They’re clearly labelling who should choose which setting. I think if you’re purposely choosing the lowest one and then saying it’s not challenging enough, isn’t that on you, not on them?

That’s a strange claim. Certainly not one I’ve ever made.

-Tom

Well if it wasn’t a matter of opinion there wouldn’t be a point in arguing. You could just open the Big Book of Game Design Facts and show Tom how wrong he is.

That is exactly my feeling. The designers have set up those difficulty levels for specific purposes. That’s game design. You then pick the level that matches what you want out of the game. bam. everyone wins. Or you could deliberately sabotage your own experience by picking one that you know you’ll enjoy less, strictly because there’s no achievement, I guess? But that’s not the designers’ fault.

In a perfect world for me, on games where reflexes, aim, etc. matter (non-MP) the games tutorial dynamically determines my difficulty setting.

So, on a game like Tomb Raider, where I suck at jumping puzzles maybe the game gives me a slight boost to jumps to stop me from just missing. Or increases the hit box slightly on enemies. By running through these situations in the tutorial the game can take a guess at what is a good challenge for me.

It’s impractical for a game to be equally accessible to everyone, so we can set aside that possibility.

However, designers design for an audience in mind. And that audience can be more or less broad, more or less diverse. That’s a choice that designers make. Let’s set aside cases of physical disability. Let’s talk about action adventure games with strong narratives. If I’m designing one, I might spend a lot of time tuning combat or traversal mechanics to cater to the large part of my audience that is engaged by that stuff. But I might also perceive that basically this same game can provide an enjoyable experience to a different sort of player, one who doesn’t want shooting challenges, etc, but who wants to take part in the adventure’s story. I can accommodate that kind of player–without in any way changing the experience for the first set of players–with an auto-aim function, or by lowering the enemy hit points, or having a game setting that means the player never dies.

As the game designer, I can intend both of these experiences within a single product, and can very simply cater to both. I think what you’ve been saying is that I’ve somehow let the first group of players down. Actually, you’ve said I’m a bad designer who can’t do his job.

The reason I think you’re wrong is that the rationale for having that “no death” button or whatever is a meta-concern. It’s a question of audiences and accessibility. It’s not actually a decision made for the integrity of the gameplay systems, so there is no need for a remedy of that kind.

“We?” Well, I’m not sure you’re speaking for, but it’s not that hard to understand that lower difficulty levels can undermine a game’s design. Consider Prey. I played Prey at the default difficulty level. By the time it was over, I could kill almost anything with an upgraded shotgun. All those cool systems and abilities and options for solving problems were useless to me because the shotgun trumped everything at the default difficulty level. All that design work, right out the window. All those tools for varying gameplay went unused. I suspect Prey falls apart even more at the lower difficulty level. Which is a shame, because a lot of work went into creating that world, its hazards, and the options for navigating its hazards.

Or consider a game with monsters that have interesting and unique AI behaviors and abilities. If I play on an easy difficult level and they’re all dying before they can demonstrate any of these behavior and abilities, the easier difficulty has undermined the game’s design. I’ll never even see the creature designs.

These are the worst. “Standard mode”? “Veterans of the genre”? “Those that prefer more challenge”? I especially love the “intended experience” line. “This is the intended experience” implies that all the others are unintended experiences.

These kinds of difficultly level descriptions are the worst, because not only do they have no idea who they’re actually talking to, but now I have to make a choice based on who I think they think they’re talking to, before I’ve even set foot in their game.

Because the moment I experience frustration, rather than engaging the intended game design, why don’t I just turn down the difficulty? Presumably the game is about, say, zapping dragons with magic wands. Now they’ve made their game about going into settings menus and reducing the dragon’s hit points. They’re both equally viable solutions to the problem that the dragon didn’t die. Shouldn’t the designer bias the actual zapping with magic wands? Isn’t that his job?

-Tom

So what is the point of “incentivized” levels? Why is wrong for a designer to say “pick how many hit points” but okay to say “pick how many hit points, if it’s over 50 you get a cookie”?

If it was part of the game progression then it can work as game design and balance. Players start on a lower level then get rewarded as they improve. But otherwise what is it for? If the cookie is intended as part of the design, let everyone have it. If it isn’t throw it out. If you put in a difficulty level, it should be balanced and rewarding to play on it’s own, for players of a given level of skill.

That sounds like an incentive to play at a higher difficulty.

So Uncharted? You want a shooter in your adventure game. And you want it to be challenging for Call of Duty players, but accessible for people who aren’t good at shooters. I would say you’ve done a poor job designing your game. You’ve either diluted your shooter, driven difficulty spikes into your adventure game, or both. And now you want to add difficulty levels to smooth over your lack of design focus.

At this point, incentivizing difficulty levels is the least of your problems. :)

Okay, but I get what you’re saying.

Not can’t do your job. Didn’t do your job.

I think we both agree that a game designer’s job is to engineer an experience. I think we can further agree that the experience will be based on the calculus of “enjoyable frustration”. So when you were making Uncharted, during the shooter parts that “frustrate” the “enjoyment” of the adventure, you knew that some players will fail during the shooter parts. The frustration might be too much. So you wanted to give them a way to get past that frustration if they’re not good at shooters.

So you put in an option to make the enemies have fewer hit points or do less damage or whatever it is that’s going to get them past that part of the game. My assertion is that part of your job when engineering an experience is keeping the player in the experience when it comes to solving the “frustration”.

But you’ve now shifted the experience to an option in the settings (see my previous post about zapping dragons with wands). You opted out of engineering the experience and left it up to me. Do I try the shootout again? Or do I go into the options menu and make the shootout easier? Why would I play the shootout twice when I could just turn down the difficulty and play it once? And more to the point, in future shootout, why would I play carefully – using cover, making sure to reload my gun, aiming carefully, flanking enemies – when I can just play the options menu instead? As a game designer, part of your job is making me want to play the shooter part of your game instead of your options menu.

And if you can’t do that, if you can’t make me want to play your shooter, you didn’t do your job engineering the experience. You probably shouldn’t have even put the shooting bits in there. So if you want to undercut them, you should find some way to incentivizing not undercutting them. In other words, if there’s a way to opt out of parts of your game, why is it even in there?

-Tom

For the same reason you presumably didn’t turn it up in Prey. You didn’t want to do the designer’s job for them. So why turn down the difficulty so that the dragon will have less hit points? Isn’t that tinkering with the designer’s job? Instead, to NOT do the designers job for them, when a game gets hard or frustrating, you don’t tinker with the difficulty and keep playing. Just like you seem unwilling to raise the difficulty when a game is not challenging enough, you should be unwilling to lower it for the same reason, right?

It’s not my job as a player to increase the amount of pushback a game offers. In fact, that’s the opposite of my job. My role in the equation is to get around the pushback. If you ask me how many hit points the monsters should have, why wouldn’t I say 1?

Your answer is “because monsters with 50 hit points are more fun”. With all due respect, you would make a terrible game designer!

Yes, we’ve already established that you’re an advocate of “finding your own fun”. :)

-Tom

You’ve discovered @justaguy2’s secret weapon. Unfortunately, he makes up the book as he goes along and he doesn’t let anyone else see it. He’s got a whole library of similar books on topics ranging from games to movies to politics.

-Tom

Because a video game (like a movie) can be different things to different people.

Notice how I keep making arguments about different strata of audiences, and you keep responding with arguments about one player’s experience?

More critically though…

Because you understand–or, well, YOU don’t understand, but preeeeeety much everyone else in this thread understands–that the settings in the options menu are a convention that exist outside of the gameplay itself to accommodate multiple kinds of players, that just because the button is there doesn’t mean that you should use it when you’re frustrated, that your experience can be better for not pushing it, and that gameplay incentives probably won’t change those fundamental facts.

So he put the tools in my hand and didn’t expect me to use them?

-Tom

So an insult, an appeal to authority, and a lecture on How Games Are Supposed To Be Played. I’m not swayed. :)

And for the record, I don’t touch the options menu. I play on normal and let the chips fall where they may (e.g. Prey).

-Tom

I want to add that I keep taking part in this conversation because I think it’s legitimately fascinating. Tom’s perspective is unusual (I think that’s safe to say), but it exposes interesting things about the nature of features in video games, different ways to play, and also unique features of games as a medium.

So Tom deserves a thank you for hopping into the firing line and being peppered with challenges, especially when it means he has to say the same things over and over again.

I wonder if an aspect of this debate has to do with Tom as a movie aficionado. Movies are just simply much more self-contained than video games, and I think Tom’s arguments here reflect a desire for games to be more self-contained, with fewer meta-concerns. In a movie, you might have to worry about the quality of the projector or the comfort of the seats or the disruptiveness of the audience, but you can’t lay these things at the feet of the filmmaker. I think the nature of games is that some of these kinds of meta-concerns are folded into the product itself, and that fact is exposing the fault line here.

You’re still arguing about the designer asking you how many hitpoints the monster should have (which, on a side note, continues to not be what’s happening - they’re telling you the monsters can have 40, 50 or 60 and you’re deciding which makes a better experience for you), when the question is “why should it be okay for them to ask you that question, but only if you get that cookie if you pick more?” Your response makes perfect sense as an argument for why they shouldn’t be asking you that (though I don’t agree, obviously) but not as a response to the actual question. So it’s easy for me to see why people assume you’re against difficulty levels, because all your rhetoric seems to be about that and not why they need to be incentivized.

Right? Like, “Games shouldn’t have difficulty levels” is a completely bog-standard opinion. If that was his POV, I may or may not agree, but I would understand it!

But, again, I don’t have to understand it. I feel like we’re all looking at the color tile Tom selected for his bathroom and being like, “I don’t like it.” We don’t have to like it!

I hadn’t really considered it from that perspective, but you might be on to something.

But I think it’s mostly that games have that necessary “frustration” component. There’s an inherent adversarial relationship between a game designer and a player; the game designer has to throw down obstacles to the player’s success. That’s a unique element in how games tell stories, with no counterpart in other forms of entertainment. And if there’s no incentive for me to overcome the obstacle using the tools the gameplay provides rather than some external difficulty setting, I’m going to be less inclined to engage the obstacle and therefore the game.

So my feeling is if one of the tools is a setting on an options menu, there needs to be some bias towards using the gameplay tools instead. A designer who doesn’t provide that bias isn’t doing his job*.

And I appreciate you guys giving me the opportunity to articulate this stuff. I know it gets rolled out a lot, but now we can have it all in one thread!

-Tom

* this is admittedly a provocative way to put it, since I’m sure people don’t like being told they aren’t doing their job by someone who’s never had to do their job