The Sweet Spots of Victory

Games
1

Since I have not started a game thread since The Great Forum Split, I will present you with a patented Sharpe Game Theory Wall O Text. You have been warned.

So I was noodling about today, thinking about the varied difficulty of the highly-praised games of recent years, and the idea of difficulty settings / difficulty sliders. I’ll throw out the theory I came up with, for discussion.

I’m thinking that rather than gamers aligning along a smooth continuum of ideal game difficulty from easy to hard, there are actually two “sweet spots” of ideal difficulty, and most gamers fall into one camp.

Obligatory “There’s two kinds of people in this world.” Youtube link.

OK, with that out of the way, here’s my theory on the difficulty dichotomy: you have gamers who cannot enjoy a game unless there’s a very real risk of losing/dying throughout the game, especially at key moments; and on the other hand you have gamers who cannot enjoy a game unless by superior skill and/or strategy they can bring the risk of losing/dying down to zero. I will label these groups the “Risky Victory” and the “Guaranteed Victory” camps.

I am definitely a Guaranteed Victory gamer. I love facing a tough challenge to figure out how to power-up my game, but once I’ve gotten the concept, I want to be able to min/max, power-level, eco-whore, and generally cakewalk my way to an assured victory every single time, like clockwork. Reducing a game to a broken state that I can romp on every time brings a tear to my min/max eye. Also, any kind of perma-death and/or permanent setback in a game is a real turn off.

On the other hand, I know a lot of folks here are Risky Victory gamers: the kind of gameplay I like would be considered boring beyond belief to that camp. For this group of gamers, in order for the game to have any real sense of challenge, accomplishment or appreciation of the key moments, there has to be a real risk that the game will hand you your ass on a plate if you don’t handle things just right. Also, perma-death and/or permanent setbacks are a source of added tension and poignancy for this type of gamer.

So if my theory is true it has several implications for game design.

First, it means that difficulty sliders are probably not as effective at making a game hit one of the sweet spots as toggled difficulty modes are. For example, limited save and perma-death toggles are a way to allow the players to easily sort themselves into one of the two camps. Also, if my theory is correct, it means that rather than increasing enemy toughness/health at higher difficulties, increasing enemy damage is more likely to give the Risky Victory gamer their sense of challenge.

This concept also allows for varied difficulty within the two approaches to difficulty: you can have easy, regular and hard enemies available in both softcore and hardcore modes, with a toggle.

Also the difficulty sliders might affect different factors depending on which sweet spot the devs are aiming for. For example, higher difficulty enemies for the Guaranteed Victory gamer would feature higher health and higher difficulty enemies for the Risky Victory gamer would feature higher damage.

Discuss. Am I off my rocker or onto something here? How should devs approach difficulty?

Disclaimer: also posted at that other forum b/c I love all my gaming brothers and sisters.

2

You call that a wall?

Edit: In the interests of contributing…

I think the new 3DS Fire Emblem does something like this. There are two different settings: Casual/Hardcore which is mostly a permadeath switch. And then an actual difficulty setting. It seems like a good way to handle things for that particular genre. Like you, I don’t much like permadeath, but I still want a robust challenge.

3

In order to comment, I need to better understand these archetypes. You first said-

“I love facing a tough challenge to figure out how to power-up my game, but once I’ve gotten the concept, I want to be able to min/max, power-level, eco-whore, and generally cakewalk my way to an assured victory every single time, like clockwork.”

You then said-

“For this group of gamers, in order for the game to have any real sense of challenge, accomplishment or appreciation of the key moments, there has to be a real risk that the game will hand you your ass on a plate if you don’t handle things just right. Also, perma-death and/or permanent setbacks are a source of added tension and poignancy for this type of gamer.”

However, I see no contradiction between these two things. The classic synthesis of the two would be the Nethack expert. Such a person masters Nethack’s complex, seemingly chaotic components such that Ascension is virtually guaranteed, but they do it in a roguelike setting with permadeath and random enemies and obstacles. Likewise, to the perfect min-maxxer of the top quote, permadeath is not a problem, as their mastery ensures they will not face it. Again, see the Nethack expert, who very very rarely dies.

At first I thought that the difference between the two was merely chaos. The top type wants virtually none of it, while the bottom type embraces it? Only chaos can defy mastery of a game’s systems. If that is the case then there is a difference between the two- even though the Nethack expert is playing a game others think of as chaotic and deadly, to him everything seems rote and deterministic. Such a person would either need to find a new game or find a mod that introduces new variables into the system, requiring new mastery.

But no one wants TRUE chaos, right? Chaos you cannot prepare for, that just makes you lose, like the power going out? So it seems that what the riskier player actually wants is to have the game introduce new variables at frequent intervals, albeit with enough time to analyze and overcome them. They also want higher stakes. Permadeath and higher “damage” (or the game equivalent) takes care of that. How do you think designers should handle the need for new variables? Ideally, the obstacles would somehow mutate to respond to player actions, but in such a way that they can be understood and overcome if you think fast enough…

4

I think my initial statement of my definitions is clearer so please look at that:

“you have gamers who cannot enjoy a game unless there’s a very real risk of losing/dying throughout the game, especially at key moments; and on the other hand you have gamers who cannot enjoy a game unless by superior skill and/or strategy they can bring the risk of losing/dying down to zero”

I think the distinction is that the Guaranteed Victory gamer wants to be able to reduce the chaos to a level of predictably winning every time whereas the Risky Victory gamer wants to overcome the chaos to win. So it is both an issue of how much risk / chaos / randomness (and these things are all subtly different in application) the player faces throughout the game, and also whether or not the game gives the players the tools to manage that risk, and to what extent. So both level of risk and management of risk versus overcoming the risk are parts of the distinction.

5

I disagree here: different games give players different tools of varying effectiveness to manage the chaos. Crowd control in RPGs is one example, as are various ways to stealth/evade in shooters, etc. In strategy games, diplomacy systems can also give the player tools to manage unpredictable events. So it’s more complicated than a pure chaos/no chaos scale.

6

This resonates pretty well with me. It’s the difference between me, who plays Civilization on King level (at highest) because I want to own the world everytime (just in a different way this time) and my good friend for whom Deity is often not hard enough because if he doesn’t have to struggle it’s not fun.

7

I would be in the “Guaranteed” group as well, in large part because more than anything I hate replaying content. A “Risky” gamer will replay a level 10 or 50 times to win or get a perfect score or whatever, whereas games in which I die and lose all progress just make me not want to play.

That is, unless the failure was due to some strategic blunder that became apparent in retrospect - then I can replay it feeling like I learned something. Basically I want a game to always reward me in some way even when I lose, so it never feels like the time was wasted.

Perhaps you could say that Guaranteeds find their challenge in Preparation, while Riskies are all about Execution.

8

Not to add much to this discussion, but one game that annoys me to the point of not wanting to play it is Elder Sign on iOS. It’s basically a luck and dice based game so that regardless of your actions you can lose from several “bad rolls” even if you make all the “right” choices to maximize your position. For some reason this bothers me more than your typical deck building games like Ascension which are also heavily luck based but at least force both players to deal with the draw.

9

Unless I am having my ass handed too me I’m not having fun. However I do have to see some hope of victory. Making me feel accomplished brings on big temporary boner.

10

In the two categories you made up Sharpe, my instinct is always to play like a Guaranteed Victory Gamer: to power level, min-max, take any advantage I can think of, and ease my way to victory. That’s my instinct on how to play. But the games I like best always turn out to be the ones that break me out of that pattern and push back at me unexpectedly. Suddenly I find myself in the middle of Chaos, or a super leveled or smart enemy, or overwhelming odds, and instead of feeling discouraged, I find myself suddenly sitting up and reloading the game with more enthusiasm.

The poster child for Chaos, for me, is Far Cry 2. What was really interesting was reading an interview with Clint Hocking on how they’d initially designed the game to be like the first Far Cry: You go on a hill, you select all your targets, and then you systematically take them all out. But during testing they found that people had the most fun and memorable experiences when things didn’t go the way they expected. All the best stories came from when things went wrong. So they deliberately inserted Chaos into the game from that point onward, trying to make it so that the chances of shit going sideways in any given situation got higher and higher. The fact that this happened in Far Cry 2 and was my favorite part of the game was so cool. But it was really cool to find out that it was all deliberate design. It wasn’t just a happy accident that I had so many cool stories to tell about things that happened dynamically in that game.

Another game where I always tried to find the right balance and pushback was Civilization 2 and then Civilization 3. In Civ2, I made my way up the difficulty levels, but I couldn’t get myself to go to the highest (Diety) level, since the AI players cheated. Instead I stayed one level lower than that, and then created my own challenges. I’d play on the Earth map, where I’d start as Egypt (starting location where real life Cairo is) and make my nemesis Lincoln, and set him up as the only AI opponent in the Americas. That way he could expand unhindered and by the time I took over Eurasia/Africa/Australia, I knew I’d have a modern day showdown with Lincoln right around the time of World War 2 technology and onwards.

And later, when I figured out how to win even that scenario, I switched roles and became Lincoln, and would fight against Chinese/African/European rivals later in the game, which was much tougher.

One game in which I always played to min-max and tried to create a huge army before going forth was Heroes of Might and Magic 2. I remember playing the demo where I suddenly got my ass handed to me by an AI player who had an even bigger army at my doorstep fairly early. I sat up and became even more interested. Same thing happened many years later when the Heroes V demo came out, and the beginning of the 2nd Week of play, a hero came to my town to obliterate me. I wasn’t sure I was interested in a Heroes V until that moment. When he completely destroyed me, I knew I was going to pre-order the game. (And then the full game out, and the campaign started off so boring I never played it).

So yeah, I always play to min-max, but I only love it, really, really love it, when a game pushes back. So I have to fight my own instincts in order to maximize my fun.

11

Interesting, this is a good point, in that I find myself feeling the same way often. Specifically: building up to the point where I can crush all before and then nonetheless finding a worthy foe. The HoMM games often provided good fodder for this. My first memory of this is actually from HoMM’s predecessor, the original King’s Bounty. I had built up an A stack and was smoking all opposition when I rolled onto that last continent and met the first boss there. I loaded the tac screen, looked at the opposition, and said “WTF? FIVE THOUSAND PEASANTS?”. Of course, I had to reload and rebuild to crush that castle. And King’s Bounty didn’t let up: after getting my A-stack to peasant slaughtering massive-itude, I then attacked the final castle only to say “WTF?? TWENTY FIVE DRAGONS??”.

Games that deliver that mix of letting me build up to massive power, and then still manage to throw a meaningful challenge at me without resorting to random silliness tend to give me the best experiences. However, if you take that too far, to the point where theres no save/load or permadeath or final bosses that are just outright painful, then I lose interest. It’s all about the sweet spot.