Game Difficulty
Tags: Trails Of Cold Steel, Game Design, Medieval 2 Total War, Trails In The Sky, Ori And The Blind Forest

“Challenge” is not a inherent part of video games. Games can be toy-like, relaxing, simple, casual. Target demographic matters: It’s weird to complain that a game for children is child’s play. The hardware matters: It’s unfair to demand mouse-like precision when playing a console game. The design goals matter: Developers often rather have the players see end of a game. Challenge also cannot be separated from rest of the game design.: Some games are open-ended, focus on giving the player a lot of options. These games fundamentally rely on player agency, and have a hard time creating controlled environments for challenges, they are often more suited for self-imposed challenges. Nevertheless, a well-considered, tasteful level of difficulty can embolden core strengths of the gameplay, push the player out of their shell, and make them approach the game with a more sensitive eye that appreciates little nuances. It’s still good to have options however, because there is never a one-size-fits-all level of difficulty for everyone. There are also certain methods of difficulty that cause frustration more than not, and should best be left optional.

Medieval 2: Total War(2006) is dreadful to play on higher difficulties. All of your neighbors attack me on first opportunity, usually ignoring any other neighbors. When I try to play defensively and expand slowly, they will send armies over and over, there are times I have fought more than a dozen battles. It’s a most unwise way to play. The game isn’t unbeatable however, one just needs to play aggressively. The more aggressive, the better. The faster I conquer provinces, the more enemy becomes deprived from resources. I gain loot by capturing them and I get more taxes from new cities every turn, thus having even more armies to crush anything on my path. AI is completely helpless against this snowball effect. However, this isn’t too much fun either. This makes me too strong too early, and there is no time or need to use any sophisticated units. No guns, no heavy infantry, no elite archers. Just mercenaries, basic town units and general’s bodyguard can conquer the world. No need to any fun diversions like assassins, I can steamroll anyone before I can train one useful enough to kill a general. No need to care about religious mechanics or happiness in cities, I can just exterminate the population. No need to merchants, general traits, or most other mechanics. Even if I play recklessly and lose couple of cities, I can easily conquer more faster. The first time I did this, it was mildly enjoyable but the fact that I had to play like this every time made me soured any interest to play more in the future. Then, one day, I asked myself: “Why don’t I lower the difficulty?”. And I did. This made me finally remember why I liked the game so much once. I could play slow; develop large, bursting, happy cities and. build armies of elite soldiers. AI wasn’t obnoxiously aggressive and didn’t back-stab me in every chance. The game was pleasant, not stressful. I could play the way I wanted. I did not started any wars, merely retaliated, I released any prisoner I captured, never resorted the cruelty in conquered provinces. nurtured honorable and heroic generals. Diplomacy is bare bones in the game, but I still tried to keep my reputation as high as possible, because I could. I had so much fun when the game didn’t force me to optimize my behavior.

A common complaint about Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim(2011) is that the game is too easy, but such remarks hides the true grievances. There is a difficulty slider in the game, but the only thing it does is to punish the player for playing a magic-oriented build and make even the simplest encounter last 5 minutes. The game has difficult bosses, but the only real difference from easier ones is the amount of time they take to be defeated. As I have stated before, Skyrim is truly beautiful as a stroll in the forest. Whenever it tries to challenge however, it can only become a facsimile of better games. People don’t really complain that Skyrim is easy, they complain that it is a game that detests being hard. The fact that players and modders need to alter the gameplay so drastically to make the game even slightly challenging in the way most expect from similar games is a testament to the game’s inherent allergy towards difficulty.

In Trails of Cold Steel (began in 2013) series, the hardest difficulty “Nightmare” gives enemies more health and makes their attacks considerably more powerful. Protective abilities are costly and slow. Many bosses can heal themselves to full or make devastating attacks that pierce through any protective spell. If the characters are not fast enough, the enemies will get more turns and attack more. The only way to defeat the bosses is to be fast and strike hard as much as possible. Thankfully, the player can achieve really big combo attacks with correct builds. And, it works so well! The exhilarating rush of overwhelming the enemies with a well-planned chained of moves is superb, the game is able to create feeling of a flashy, bombastic arcade game within a turn-based combat system. Sure, it restricts the player options; as in one can’t approach the battles in the manner of classic RPG boss fights where the player slowly dwindles the enemy while trying to survive. This is perfectly fine, because the play style the game is pushing me is much more interesting. There are countless RPGs with “war of attrition” bosses. By punishing slow play, the game is able to guide the player into its unique and interesting features. And the beauty of difficulty options is such that, a player can always play on lower difficulties if it is too much for them. When it comes to linear gameplay, merely tweaking some numbers might be enough to make a game that’s just right for everyone.

A couple of difficulty modes can really enhance the game. I am bad at action games and when I saw Bioshock Infinite(2013)’s fast-paced, frantic gameplay, I knew I had to play the game on easy. And thankfully I did, it made the game quite tolerable overall, otherwise I cannot ever imagine tackling those sloppy gun-fights seriously. I like Starcraft(1998) quite a bit but, it’s Brood War expansion was way too brutal. There are no easy options, I am simply not good enough. And this is a inherent weakness of the games with unforgiving difficulty. A game won’t lose anything with having some cheats or a story mode. It will only win people who would otherwise give up on the game. Moreover, there is no reason to have the game resent the player for playing on easy. No locking main content behind harder difficulties, no fake endings, no mockery or passive-aggressiveness. Instead, it is much better to acknowledge and reward skillful play instead; with harder levels, enabling different ways of restrictions and so on. A game can’t and does not need to cater to everyone, but even a little seasoning can make it much more approachable to lots of people.

Beyond just different game modes, there are couple of noteworthy and, notorious patterns of difficulty I encounter in games:

Undoing huge amount of progress:

This is quite nasty. Old games did this a lot with limited lives, but the thing is, they were outdated even in Super Mario Brothers(1985). And that game was aware about this, it gave lots of extra lives and short-cuts so that players wouldn’t be too bothered by dying. I really like when games allow me to build to grow and be stronger, and don’t like when it demands me of re-take the challenges over and over to satisfy an arbitrary level of excellence. There is a case to be made about games with permanent death mechanic however. I am not too sure, because I have never played a game like that, but perhaps, because the game sets the player up for the end from the very beginning, it fosters a different kind of mentality than simply forcing them to making no mistakes. Otherwise, perfect runs can be offered as an optional mechanic.

Locking the ability to save:

I hate it, I really do. I should be able to save as much as I like, full stop. I don’t like checkpoints too, but I can tolerate them if they are numerous enough. This is the worst way to mess up with the player’s progress without openly trolling them. There is one fairly ubiquitous reason tampering with saves: To prevent “save-scumming”, in other words, loading old saves over and over to get a favorable outcome, as it usually bypasses the challenge to a certain degree. Here is my answer to this: Save-scumming is a response to faulty game design. It is usually not that fun. I would rather not do it, and I feel a lot of people wouldn’t too, but players don’t want to lose progress. Save-scumming happens either when something crucial is dependent on luck or the challenge is too demanding to take on at once. If the player is expected to embrace randomness, the feeling should be instilled very early on and the cost of failure shouldn’t be unbearable.

Europa Universalis 4(2013) is a game whose gameplay is heavily in the hands of fate. Battles, sieges and quite a few actions are influenced by dice, there are random events having positive or negative outcomes, there is at least a little randomness in almost every part of the game. Some of these random elements can be mitigated, a stronger country can weather more bad outcomes and, but even playing as a super-power, player is still sailing a boat on a raging ocean. And I get it, while it is frustrating sometimes, trying to recover from bad luck has its own charm. However, this completely turns on its head when trying to get difficult achievements. Now, not only I am only interested in optimal behavior, because of higher requirements or weaker starts I need to deal with, there is little room for failure. Obviously, for a “true challenge”, you are not allowed to load older saves during gameplay. Also obviously, I save-scum by quitting the game from desktop before it auto-saves. I am not going to risk hours of gameplay because of something random, ( or I misread the game’s not-ideal UI or it gave me wrong information or a glitch occurred or…) Randomness and perfection do not mix together.

Most games often do not have a graceful difficulty curve, there is usually that one place players fail again and again. And, it’s very understandable not to want to overtake a difficult challenge repeatedly just because of a single mistake. As I said before, demanding perfection can make players optimize themselves to boredom, and this is perhaps the most common way this happens. Again, having options help here. More tips, easier modes, cheats, perhaps allowing to skip levels are all better solutions than limiting saves. Besides the specifics of game design, the other solution is to avoid pushing players into perfection all together. Some games evaluate player’s performance at the end of the level. Missing a good score might be thing that pushes players into save-scumming. To prevent this, players shouldn’t feel like the game is screwed out of feeling complete. Giving player’s opportunities to recover from mistakes or dividing the challenge with checkpoints might convince players to keep going instead.

However tedious save-scumming might be, it’s always preferable to the anxiety of spending long stretches of time not being able to save. Some games try to be more experimental about save points, treating them as resources. for example. LISA: The Painful(2014) has one-time consumable save points, thankfully as an optional difficulty mode. Ori and the Blind Forest(2015) has limited saves, but the game is generous enough about them, and they actually serve to choose the re-spawn location. In most other cases, I don’t like deviations from convenience. This might seem narrow-minded, but I feel this is an issue beyond any issue in gameplay, it is a matter of fundamental user-friendly software design. Games are already time-consuming as they are, frankly they have no right to be so callous about player’s progress. There might be a troublesome glitch, a power outage, some sort of emergency, or player simply just wants to quit and continue later. I cannot ever see a justification of such entitlement to force players to play for an arbitrary about of time other than “People have adjusted themselves to a bad tradition.”. And as I said, I truly believe if save-scumming alone actually ruins the challenge of a game, that game’s design is truly flawed. Look at Trails in the Sky(2004), does it restrict saving and loading at all? No! Because, it’s a good game that is confident in it’s design.

Hiding Necessary Information

A boss turns out to be immune to the attack. The useless item from the beginning is maybe vital to get the best ending. Sometimes there is no map and there is no clue about what to do next. The intention is to give to player a sense of uncertainty and mystery. This can be used to great effect to make the player feel more adventurous, or heighten the sense of horror, but usually it just makes me to look up a guide. Game guides are fun, I love to learn about a game I enjoy as much as possible. and I even enjoy stumbling into secrets as much as anyone, but at the very least the game mechanics should be transparent as possible. Doing A yields B, getting X needs Y. I am not really sure what makes game devs so hesitant about this. Perhaps they are scared of their game looking too complex or maybe it’s assumed showing too many numbers break immersion in “cinematic experiences”? If the enemies in the game has level scaling for example, isn’t it much better to know that from the start? And surely it would be nice if player could make educated guesses about how their builds fare in the late game. Thankfully, at least as far as contemporary games are concerned, lack of information is never severe enough to stop players from soft-locking their game, but it’s still perplexing and occasionally frustrating that games are reluctant to explain themselves.

I love games which are honest about their challenges , rewards me for the progress I make and appreciate when they try to accommodate different levels of skill. I am also well aware that media is not produced tailor-made for me and respect games aiming for niche experiences, but I never look highly to games which are openly disregard user-convenience or accessibility to create challenges. Moreover, a game aiming for being difficult does not give it a blanket protection from criticism on it’s difficulty. One can desire a good challenge and can still find what’s offered overwhelming, tedious, or unfair. It’s always better to have an honest discussion on design instead of mocking people for playing badly. No one has to be good at the games and super majority of games are intended to be beaten, most anyone can beat a game if they put the work on it, but sometimes people just don’t feel it’s worth their time.

This article is written thanks to my dearest Patrons and special thanks to: Acelin, Laura Watson, , Makkovar, MasterofCubes, Morgan, Otakundead and Spencer Gill.