Difficulty levels in games

[tomchick]

@Nightgaunt

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.

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.

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.

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