Regarding auto-adjusting difficulty - Devil May Cry is an interesting case… I think 4 did this and it really bothered me. As a game where I was focused on mastering and overcoming a challenge, having it change out from under me without my consent was really frustrating and disheartening. After enough failures, I didn’t even get the chance to learn how to overcome the original challenge. I think this problem only applies to games where the challenge for me is the point. When the challenge is just part of the aesthetic (like in the Uncharted series), I think auto-adjusting is probably a brilliant idea! Uncharted probably already does this, right? Seems so perfect for that series.
But do we take out the persistence and difficulty in succeeding with a game when we can adjust the difficulty? In Pillars if I found a dead end in some build I might try a new spec…if we had a stationary difficulty wouldn’t it be more fun to succeed after trying new builds?
Mono it seems to me that part of what makes some games play the way they are meant to would mean NO changes (or very little) in difficulty.
I am on the fence on this one. Porous I get that having a bunch of games in our backlogs might make us impatient to get through one but I am not sure that can be a relevant factor here.
The thing is: how do you determine if the challenge is the point for a given player? Sure, it might be what the designer was most interested in, but any medium and particularly an interactive one like gaming is a conversation between creator and consumer, and so the creator’s focus isn’t the only one that matters. I know I for one almost never find it to be a compelling aspect of games, much less the compelling aspect.
And if it isn’t what a player is there for, “saving” that aspect of the game for them is quite possibly actively counterproductive.
But why do you care, at all, how I or anyone else plays the game. If I am having fun in a different way than you are, that does not mean you suddenly can’t have fun.
Now having said that, I only use mods typically in game that are designed for them, like Rimworld, or Civ, and I almost always play on normal at the default setting until something tells me to change it or feedback suggests I do. I don’t really care though if someone else played differently than I do. It’s just awesome I have someone to talk to about games and hell, now we have even played the same one.
No Nes I hope everyone is having the most fun they can on any game. My point is strictly selfish with regard to difficulty settings: What makes me have the most fun. And sometimes having a non-variable fixed difficulty setting (or very small variable) makes me have more fun: Challenge. Exploration. Work-around in-game. Re-builds.
If they have an Ironman, permadeath, prince or king or whatever they want to call difficulty. You can still choose that. The fact they have a normal or maybe an easy or something else, doesn’t mean you can’t do that. I don’t think anyone is saying every game has to have that, but I don’t understand why the option would be so poorly received by some. You can still play without tweaking anything. It’s just an option.
It’s also worth reiterating that making a game harder for oneself is typically at least as much a matter of self-imposed discipline as it is anything inherent to the game (not just avoiding lowering the difficulty or using broken tactics; people do runs with all sorts of external conduct constraints in games all the time - see for example soul level 1 runs of the Dark Souls games), whereas people who want the game to be easier generally have to rely on the designer giving them that option. So if the choice really is to cater to one side or the other, I think it’s clear that the latter need that support more.
I totally agree! So… don’t change the difficulty! :)
Entering the menu and changing the difficulty is not a part of gameplay or game design. It’s the way video games let you apply custom rules just as you might w/ a board game, or debating over nuances in your RL game of capture the flag. But if you want the game the way it’s ‘meant to be played’ then fire up normal difficulty and have at it.
This sounds a topic like an itch.io hour long game that i need to make. Well, not me. Alternate universe me who has the skills and time to do so.
Some side scroller - with a win button at the top. All you have to do is hit the win button, and you win. How long can you play before you hit the win button?
I suspect the reason some people like difficulty settings and some people hate difficulty settings is very similar to achievements. I literally don’t even notice achivements, and could care less about them. Other people want to hunt them down and do every single one, get that 100%. That’s bizarre and incomprehensible to me, but there’s this OCD thing achievements are tapping into.
Give people a win button, and a lot of people are going to hit the win button, and they’re going to hate the game because it’s too easy because they can’t help themselves and will always hit the win button. They need the game to take the win button away because they don’t/won’t/don’t want to have the self control to not hit it.
I think in the end I’d prefer a simple 3 degree difficulty setting: easy, NORMAL, and super hard. I will just play normal and hope the developer knows enough to make it challenging.
BTW – this whole thing started out as a reference to Pathfinder: Kingmaker and that game on middle difficulty is pretty freaking challenging. As opposed to “challenging” setting. Or at least I think it did.
Again it depends on the game. Most games are fine with difficulty options, But some would be worse with them. Above somebody mentions Shiren the Wanderer and I could not agree more. Dark Souls with an easy mode would also suffer. If a game is built around the player managing frustration and learning through, adding a game option to lower difficulty means adding a way for players to skip the core of the experience, and the difficulty itself will push players towards taking that option. Thus making a game that pushes you towards spoiling your own experience, or bad game design. Difficulty options are a design choice that has ramifications. Most times it doesn’t matter, but there are certainly titles where it does.
And then there’s the specifity of the expression itself, think of your favorite book and people arguing for a simplified language version. Or a non profanity version. The existence of such a version does not diminish your enjoyment of the book, but it feels somehow wrong to modify a work like that, doesn’t it?
For those of us for who difficulty tuning sometimes carries expression, it’s like that for some games.
It might be worse for you, if you selected the options; you don’t have to. No one forces you to use options that are there. No one. It wouldn’t be worse for everyone even if you think the option someone else chooses, not you, somehow cheapens your experience. You can’t spoil something for someone else except by demanding they have the same experience you had and insist they enjoy it. There’s nothing being spoiled if someone has fun with it.
We have non-profanity versions of a lot of music, a lot of it, so it can play on the radio. I am fine with that by the way. If I want the profanity laced version of a song, there is nothing stopping me from getting it. In fact, I don’t mind if a friend of mine likes the clean version of a favorite song, and I listen to the other one. Why would I care about that? It’s close enough that I still get to share my passion with my friend even though she or he experiences it slightly different. That’s still joy. That’s still fun. That’s still a shared experience. Why would the existence of that diminish anything for me?
No. I don’t think it is somehow wrong. In fact, the existence of being able to share a game with a friend, a song, a movie that I couldn’t before… that’s somehow better.
Right, but I’m going to. That was my point above. I will turn down the difficulty of a game that I would have actually enjoyed much better figuring out.
That was not a point I was trying to make at all. Rather, my point was that in some games I 100% agree with @Nesrie and @malkav11 's views on difficulty. On other games I completely relate to @Thraeg and / or @tomchick (who’s views are somewhat similar). So I’d rather games be the way they are now - that means some games will be too hard and I’ll give up (like Wolfenstein), but it also means some games will push me just the right amount to be immensely satisfying, and some games will be a great story where I don’t care whatsoever about the challenge. Diversity is great!
So different question.
Does it matter at all the most games are not finished by most players, that most never seen the games completion. That means the majority of gamers never actually get the complete experience of the game they play. Now there could be a variety of reasons for this, some of it has to do with not liking the game, no matter the difficulty, some of it is length, and other interests, but I imagine some of it is… difficulty, too easy or hard. Is that what the creators want? Forget about sales and money.
I mean we’ve brought up books and movies and music and I imagine all of those have a better completion rate than games. When the creators have this… vision, if you will, do they want people to see all of it, to experience all of it, and do they want more or less people to have the experience?
Now maybe there are some specific artsy games or some stories to be told in a certain way or hey if we lose half our players at level 10 they run around and high-five each other and brag about how hard they made it, but suspect most games don’t fall into these rare groups. I would think a lot of games are created for enjoyment, and they want people to see what they spent so much time working on, something other than everyone viewing a Twitch stream.
Is that wrong? Do most creators want to weed out the weak, punish the unskilled, and remove that player from some if not all their future titles? Again we’re not talking about money here, we’re talking about the experience and the intent of the creators.
I doubt most games that go unfinished are so because of difficulty. Most unfinished games are just too damn long. I tend to finish most difficult games I play, because they also tend to be mercifully short (for me short but challenging is indeed a selling point), Hell, The Witcher 3 is not difficult at all, yet it took me years to finish due to the absurd length.
Would those designers have gotten a higher completion percentage by making the game 75% shorter? For sure. Don’t they want players to experience the whole experience? Of course. Then why it’s the game so freaking long? Because that’s the game they wanted to make.
Shouldn’t they include an abridged version for those of us who don’t have time, so that non-crucial plot points and levels are skipped? Do most creators want to push us time-Impaired away from their creations?
Is that wrong? Do most creators want to weed out the busy, punish the time-impaired, and remove that player from some if not all their future titles? Again we’re not talking about money here, we’re talking about the experience and the intent of the creators.
But honestly, if we are worried about games being unfinished by players, just make all games 6 hours long. Problem solved. Time played correlates like crazy with player abandonment and difficult games are not completed less often than easy ones with the same median playtime.
I think if someone quits a game in an hour, it’s not because it was too long. They were estimating 9 out of 10 gamers don’t finish a game. Read Dead Redemption was only about 30 hours and they said only around10% finished that final mission.
So again we’re talking about intention and experience right, getting the “right” experience? So it’s not okay to experience the game differently because you don’t get the “real” experience if you tweak settings or change difficulties, but it’s perfectly okay not to finish a game at all which is also not the… full experience, so therefore it’s not the real experience either. That doesn’t really make sense. Also, some of the people playing these “hard” games, spend their time watching videos and reading forums how to overcome the obstacles, like watching the exact thing other people do so they can do, which they don’t consider cheapening but somehow if someone plays on easy and doesn’t look up anything, that’s cheap.
.
See these rules just don’t make sense. They’re designed to make people feel better about what other people are doing. What do I care what other people are doing? Also the cheating thing… they used to ship cheats, the this is how you do it little books right in the box, how is that better than a difficulty setting. I guess for the people that got to live through little booklets with red tape so you could read how to do it, that wasn’t appreciated either right, because they wouldn’t be able to resist looking since it was right there?
It’s ok to abandon a game because it’s too long and it’s ok to abandon it because it’s too hard. It’s the player’s time and the player’ll do whatever the player wants.
But it does not mean a designer needs to implement a level skip, a combat skip, abridges cutscenes… to make the game shorter, and it does not mean they need to implement selectable difficulty if they feel they want a very specific experience.
I have nothing about players playing whatever way they want, not at all. You can always skip all cutscenes or leave the game open during them and go make a coffee. It’s the equivalent to cheating your way through a game with challenge at the core of its experience. Its fine if you don’t want to experience it as designed (like watching a movie on mute), and I do play games “not the way you are supposed to” many times, it’s only that I don’t see why designers should be accommodating (other than for financial reasons) if they feel it collides with the core experience they are crafting. It’s ok both to the player to cheat or skip a big chunk of the experience and for the designers not to give a damn about players that play that way (because maybe they are just not making the game to be played that way).
But it’s true that the extremes are interesting. Some games I feel are designed around the existence of forums, guides and such.in that they would be next to impossible without a whole community working them out, and the process of looking for cheats is part of the intended experience. I would posit a La-Mulana with selectable puzzle difficulty would be a travesty (and I did not finish that game because it was too hard).
Sorry that I’ve just been skimming the thread – I’m sort of offline this week – but unless I’m misunderstanding you, I think you know better. I don’t believe you believe this.
Here’s a simple example. Take a shooter in which the AI has different reactions to being shot. Some might hide, some might berzerk, some might change weapons, some might crouch, whatever. A lot of AI is scripting behavioral reactions. Now put difficulty settings in the game. You know, the usual stuff that adjusts monsters’ hit points, how much damage I take from weapons, and how much damage my weapons do. If I play on easy so that my shots quickly kill monsters, I won’t see any of that AI. I will just mow down monsters easily and surmise that, eh, the game is shallow. Which, oddly enough, is where all too many games err with their “normal” difficulty settings. Most game designers – or maybe it’s just the publishers – are terrified at the prospect of people finding their games too hard.
It’s exactly what I’m talking about with RPGs like Divinity Original Sin 2. The difficulty level – how much the game pushes back on me and therefore how well I have to manage the systems – is integral to game design and gameplay. Part of the designer’s job is tuning that stuff and when I duck into a menu at any time to choose easy, normal, or hard, it’s entirely possible that I can subvert huge swathes of the design.
No. A) “Finish” means different things to different people, and B) no game design should be predicated on the idea that most players won’t get far.
-Tom
Developers are usually quite clear what game you’re about to play when you choose your difficulty.
It’s akin to setting rules in a board game that make the game easier or more punishing. Nothing prevents you from changing board game rules on the fly either.
However once you decide what game you’re going to play, ‘ducking into the menu at any time’ is no longer a part of the game. It’s like deciding to make dice roll requirements in a board game more forgiving when you’re 20 minutes in and getting your butt kicked. Once you embark on the path, it’s on you if you wanted to play
but ultimately end up playing this
This is why I like the dark souls games, no adjustable difficulty, but the developers add in the summon npc / real players to help out if you choose to use them. And YMMV as they aren’t always that useful.