I’ve had this thought rattling around my head for many years now, regarding what people consider difficult and why. Obviously I am not the first, and won’t, by a long shot, be the last, to discuss this, but I think sharing my thoughts on the matter may prove constructive, and hopefully might set off some creative spark in some who do read this.
I used to be the sort of person, well, the kind of blokey bloke, who’d huff at people playing games on the easiest difficulty. “That misses the point!” I’d say, as I played every game a minimum of one difficulty above ‘normal’, “You’re not experiencing the game in full!”. For a lot of years I also felt inferior as a result, when a game proved too difficult, and I’d sometimes wind up abandoning a game, simply because I couldn’t take the humiliation – I was better than that, I told myself, it had to be the game that was at fault, not cool old me, who played games on high difficulties. This, in time, lead to me arguing with friends over what ‘difficult’ constitutes, and especially in regards to level locks (Hard gates set by the level of a character or player), and heavily stat balanced gameplay.
Here are my old arguments regarding what constitutes difficulty:
- The amount of thought that goes into every choice and action before it is successful – higher = harder
- The number of ‘failures’ the player is allowed before being put back either to the start of the level, or the start of the game – lower, of course, meaning harder
- The third and final point – Amount of UI and hints. Less UI and fewer hints, of course, meaning the game was more difficult.
This makes sense, even now. I can read through this and go ‘yeah, that’s not wrong’, but there is something about this way of thinking that just, rubs me the wrong way. It doesn’t seem like it’s taking into account the actual gameplay of various types of game. No difficulty is something deeper than ‘how much handholding’ or ‘are you allowed mistakes’, difficulty comes from a place of much, much, deeper and more intrinsic design.
Lets break down my old arguments, for the sake of reasoning. 1. Thought time. The amount of time you spend thinking about each action varies mostly by design – in a racing game you have no time to think: The player who acts on instinct and experience has the best chance to win, while in a turn based strategy game thinking can be crucial, and will almost always give the player with the most experience and problem solving capabilities the win (Though flukes do happen). The amount of time needed in each type of game could still be gauged separately, but the fact remains that even if you quantify thought time required as T, it is still true that T^2 is positive in games with no element of timing, and negative elsewhere. 2. Number of failures. Failures in this case, I will treat as any choice the player makes that leads to incoming harm, even if that ‘harm’ be a loss of resources, a loss of momentum or similar. While in many games the value of a failure is as stated, a measure of difficulty, of how many steps away you are from Game Over at any given time, there are games that eschew this idea – for example, Company of Heroes allows both sides any amount of failures – while you may lose land and thus resources, a clever player acting on impetus and strategic know how can turn a losing struggle around and claw a win from a string of defeats, since the basic and most important resource is not rewarded based on how well a player is doing. Games where this is apparently very true, however, includes such things as platformers, shooters and rhythm games. Whether number of failures should be used as a way to gauge difficulty or not, it is an important tool for game designers and an integral part of many games, which, regardless, affect the difficulty in some way, even though it may not necessarily be for better or worse. 3. The blind man in a world of seeing. A lack of UI is a common trope among ‘hardcore’ and ‘permadeath’ games and mods – the logic being that if you don’t know where things are, you obviously have to think more for yourself and make more sound decisions, thus the game being harder and more immersive… right? Well, I would say, as someone who used to fall for this a lot, even to the point of downloading ‘no UI’ mods for games I liked, that it’s not actually a very good gauge of difficulty, nor necessarily something that adds difficulty to the game. Rather, the lack of UIs and hints adds hassle, in many cases – having to open inventories and maps more often, not being able to quickly select a thing you are carrying or forgetting about a mechanic entirely because the prompt never appears – this is not difficulty, nor immersive, it is a frustration that lengthens gameplay and compounds a games weaknesses unnecessarily, but more on that later. I have played plenty of games where difficulty persists in complete disregard of whether enemies are marked on your minimap or whether there’s an objective marker telling you where to go, and vice versa: have played many games where the complete lack of UI added excitement and difficulty without negatively impacting UX nor compounding game length.
So, if difficulty does not come from a shop- I mean from Thought time + Allowed failures + Lack of UI, then what does difficulty make? It is of my opinion that difficulty is difficult to gauge as a value, because we first have to split it into two categories – Perceived difficulty (P) and Experienced difficulty (E), these combine to make the player feel like they’re playing a difficult game, but use entirely different mechanics to do so. First – P.
P is a measure of how difficult a player feels that a game is. This comes, in no small part, from such things as allowed failures before appearing to be about to game over (Though not necessarily in actuality nearing game over), time given to think over each action (Where the time given can be seen as a constant partition of the time it takes to deal with one ‘encounter’ whatever that may mean in the given game) and the audio-visual feedback given to the player regarding their current progress towards victory (Such as flashing buttons and indicators, screen effects and harrowing sounds).
E is a measure of how difficult the game actually is ‘under the hood’. The player may feel like they’re barely being challenged, while the game itself only gives them one life to get through a 60 minute experience, by using UI and design elements that lessen the perceived impact of Game Over (Take player levels in permadeath games, for example, where the player continues to unlock things outside of the main gameplay loop, in spite of their character dying forever). Such things as highly intelligent AI enemies, enemy spacing, distances between engagements/rewards and the like may be counted as E.
So, how do we make a game difficult, rather than tedious or frustrating? Find out in part 2 ;)