Making difficulty curves in games
davetech.co.uk
davetech.co.uk
Please never do this. This deceptively looks smart to a game designer, but actual players read this like a book and then it feels cheap and massively unrewarding for them.
But then I noticed that the loot was entirely dynamic. I forget the exact items, but if you only use one grenade it will only generate one refill hidden around the next area. If you use all your resources though, the upcoming loot gets massively increased and you can usually get almost all of it back right away. I learned this partway through and completely changed my playstyle and really broke the immersion to see the game difficulty change in realtime. I reloaded a save and played differently, and the next area was filled with loot instead of empty. But when asking my friends what they thought, none of them noticed that the game was doing this, and they all thought it was well balanced.
On the other hand, some Mario games now will essentially have a "you are dying a lot, here is a star power up to help you out, or heres luigi to play the level for you" mechanic. For a super casual game, such a mechanic is great. Its optional. If you want to lock-in and beat the hard level, you can just not grab the powerup, or say no to the prompt. But if you are getting frustrated, you can skip the hard parts and fly through to the next level and get right back to having fun.
I had the same experience, I was trying to be very accurate with the guns and thought, wow, there's hardly any ammo to pick up in this game. Partway through I got tired of being stingy and started being less careful, having fun going rambo, and suddenly ammo was spawning everywhere.
I think it would be much better if the game just spawned enough to max out your pools fairly early, so you can focus less on inventory and more on combat. Then they can adjust the size of the ammo pools to tune how accurate they want you to be.
Sounds like the design is working as intended?
You'd get the one guy on your server who was just in another league compared to everyone else, and it was so satisfying to get the kill on him. And sometimes, it would be you pubstomping.
Then again, back then I don't think people cared as much about winning and losing.
And yet it had a healthy, if unhyped, competitive scene long before that.
PvP involves sandbagging and a variety of fragile gimmick strategies. (Oh, and cheating. For slow enough turn-based games, players can cheat with a separate physical device, which can't be detected.)
The system can't measure skill level accurately against a player base that's actively antagonistic to such measurement, so of course it can't match players well on that basis.
Even abstract games of perfect information, like chess and Go, have this problem online.
But what if you're a bottom 10% player? How non-sweaty is non-SBMM then? Is it not-sweaty to get absolutely demolished all the time even at your best?
Games and leagues where you're expected to try hard are entirely different. I'd say custom tiered PUG queues are much better than common huge pools, this way top players can filter people they're training and playing with. In the end I think I rather agree with the grandparent than not, communities typically feel more lively and diverse than blind ladders.
That's just a different way of saying some people like to play games where their opponent has no chance. So your "relaxation" comes entirely at the expense of others.
Single player campaigns are a better way to accomplish this because then you can do whatever you want as far as difficulty goes.
You can see some attempts to address this with having casual 'unranked' and competitive ranked matchmaking modes, but this still runs into whether casual means 'just fuck around and not even try to play the objective' or 'play the game as a team but not be quite so focused on winning at any cost'.
People who complain about SBMM it because they just want to pubstomp are mostly just whining and want their fun at the expense of 1-11 other players, though. (I recall a conversation on here where someone was saying that the optimum winrate for chess to keep someone engaged is about 80% and did not seem to understand that there was no way to have a group of people playing chess against each other with an average 80% winrate each)
In Factorio, you build an automated factory on an alien world whose native inhabitants hate air pollution.
If you spend your time gathering resources manually or with a humble-sized factory, there'd be very little alien hostility. But the better you're playing, the grander the factories, the more you're polluting, the more aggressive the aliens attack you.
Furthermore, trees soak up CO2, so if you preserve them you reduce alien hostility, but if you go fully industrious and build on top of them you invite more alien aggression.
I think this concept is delightful and far from deceptive. It makes the game suitable for players of all levels and it meshes with the game mechanism rather than working behind your back.
hnews folks would also probably enjoy the cellular-automata-like mechanism of the pollution. Essentially the world is divided into cells and each cell has a pollution value. Pollution dissipates to nearby cells on regular intervals. Cells with trees soak up some pollution, cells with machines produce some pollution. A pollution map is available in-game.
Not stupid stuff like levelling up enemies in Bethesda games - but actual skill based games that get harder depending on how good you are at it: Resident Evil 4, Battle Garegga to name a few.
Games that unlock more content as you reach skill gates are the most memorable.
When the increased enemy health means you need to find new effective strategies and explore the depths of your moveset, and making less mistakes from increased damage - it can be really fun. Dante Must Die mode in the Devil May Cry series, or Master Ninja in Ninja Gaiden, are basically the only difficulties I care to play in those games. But along with the extra damage and health the enemies also get new tactics, which keeps things fresh and engaging. The health caps in Quake are pretty ingenious too. You level up in this games by actually increasing your skill - not by arbitrary progression gates.
When your combat system has no depth and it basically boils down to just mashing attack and circling the enemy - it definitely sucks. Bandits with glass armor in Oblivion from the level scaling is difficulty done badly.
When I’m looking for a game that I really want to sink serious time into - I always look at games with in-depth scoring systems. Scoring is great because it’s an objective measure of how well you’re playing the game the way the developer intended. Bonus points if there are online leaderboards. The style/rank systems in DmC and NG are some of the best design scoring systems for action games IMO, they allow player expression but still give you a fairly objective measure of how well you’re playing the game.
I used to play a lot of Dark Souls and speedrunning or using arbitrary rules (level 1 runs, 1 weapon only, etc…) was how the community essentially created a scoring system for themselves - which is great it provides longevity to the games. But these days I look for something a bit more defined. So I eventually turned to old school shoot’em up, run’n gun and character action games for this. For shmup and gunners specifically, the mechanics are simple on the surface but the depth comes from figuring out how to best make use of them to overcome the difficulty. The simplicity also makes them some of the easiest pick up and play games, and don’t require as much comittment as something with 10 minutes cutscenes after every 30 minutes of play.
Sorry for the rant, hard games with in-depth scoring mechanics are my current obsession, and I don’t get much opportunity to really talk about it.
I still appreciate a well-designed boss that feels intelligent, not just extremely unfair.
Or even blocks them, in games that have dynamic leveling. Oblivion is the ur-example, but I've ran across at least two more:
1. Been playing Tyranny and there are mentions in the faqs/forums that you should disable leveling of skills you don't use if you do the new game+ thing where there are no level caps.
2. And one that happened to me personally a year or two ago: was playing Grim Dawn and hit my character's incompetence ceiling. This is a gear based ARPG/Diablo clone so the solution is to get better gear. But you can't go back to an easier area to improve your gear because they're all auto scaled and every map is the same - too hard now - difficulty. So there goes the uninstall and the lost DLC sales...
Sure in the end dealing with the consequences of suboptimal game design is also just a skill issue, but I tend to play game for fun and it giving me an escape hatch for when it is just not fun makes a lot of sense.
The adage is that the customers never know what they want, and it's doubly true when it comes to video games.
https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/2009/ai_system...
Casual players giving up was a problem that no amount of shaming managed to fix ("haha skill issue, sucks to suck").
Worse though, if your game is deemed 'unfair' rather than just 'hard', then even the hardcore gamers will avoid it. That's enough to kill the business before you even start the next game.
Some studios pick the 'hardcore' market, especially once they've built a reputation and a following, but everyone else needs a more general appeal in order to stay in business.
It's essentially punishing players for playing well, and often could be gamed by playing badly intentionally.
But done well, it can much more reliably create the feeling of being just on the edge of failure but pulling through, which is really satisfying in a lot of games. L4D did this, but Helldivers 2 for example also has a lot of game design focused on creating this kind of feeling.
For example, if I want friendlier lobbies in arc raiders, I will spawn in with no loadout and purposely surrender.. I can game my difficulty lower
I worked on a commercial game where the only solution was to subtly adjust the difficulty to keep the experience enjoyable for everyone. The trick is to do it in a way that players don't notice.
Sorry, but it's hard to take this comment seriously when it reeks of "git gud". So I'll just point out that a lot of people play games, and that there are well-documented instances of games with dynamic difficulty as early as the 80s.
Of course there's a ton of this, which is exactly why I complain. Level scaling is probably the easiest to justify because it solves legitimate issues (that are often caused by other poor decisions), but other types are usually much worse.
Fair enough, I applied that lens to it on my own.
Allow me to elaborate on my earlier comment and reply to this one here:
A ton of it? No, I don't see that. It's probably the least commonly implemented approach to difficulty (curves).
Dynamically adjusted difficulty has been around for a long time, but it's never been broadly adopted. There's a lot of reasons for this I'm sure, but a couple of obvious ones are that executives don't tend to throw money at features they can't see [or game developers in general], and that it's a tricky thing to build anyway.
It's certainly not the default solution to the problem, but there's a long history of games implementing some form of dynamically adjusted difficulty. Some of them to great success with the difficulty system itself being celebrated (Xevious, Resident Evil 4, Left 4 Dead), the vast majority of them you have no idea even implemented such a feature, and there's also a number of famous examples that were widely derided for it (Oblivion, ...?). [I'm genuinely stumped to think of another famously bad example, not trying to make it look like there are fewer of one than the other. I'm sure there are just as many negatively viewed ones as I can come up with positive ones.]
While it's obviously possible that an individual designer/team didn't thoroughly test their particular feature, the concept itself has been very well tested in a wide variety of implementations/mechanics. And if you're playing a game designed by people who didn't test it, the difficulty scaling seems likely to be the least of your problems.
This is interesting to me; can you explain please?
Power fantasy during leveling / campaigning always comes from being “ahead of the curve” gear/build wise — the subject of your combat is rarely meaningful
City builders do this a lot where you often have lots of difficulty settings you can adjust to tailor the game to your preferred playstyle.
I’ll also say this: if you’re making a game and you add in a mechanic or mini-game that is not typical of the genre, make it optional or provide a way to skip it. Few things things in gaming piss me off more than a memory or Simon Says puzzle in an MMO or similar. If I wanted to play puzzle games, I’d be playing a puzzle game, not your game.
If a game can afford a designers to really think what the experience should be, I think the gold standard should be no difficulty slider. Playing the game should be a self-consistent experience that gets more difficult as you get better at the game, and gating the final content with skills is very rewarding and makes the experience feel more "real" than if you just get a super configurable game where everything can be turned on/off.
I liked when games used to include cheat codes or debug commands. Let me trivialize the game if I want to. I paid for it and it’s my time I’m spending. Not once did I ever play The Sims as intended. And enjoyed it enough to buy another version or two. I used cheats all the time in WarCraft 2 and StarCraft single player.
And when games don’t include that, almost always someone will create a hack or mod that does do that, because there is a demand for it.
In short, there needs to be intention and design, and not just exposing the developer tools, generally speaking.
Depends on the type of game, but I'd generally prefer those decisions be made by the game designer. If there's frustration I want it to feel like overcoming a concrete obstacle, rather than it being self-hindering that accomplishes nothing and that I could've just avoided.
Seeing a massive stream of games that all surround the same 12 or so mechanics has been eye opening. The games range in duration from ~2 hours all the way to several days of content, although most premises seem to get old at around 4-6 hours.
At first I was doing research for my own game ideas, now I'm kind of mesmerized by the variety and the general relaxed atmosphere of these idle games.
Normal varies so much.
As a "cozy" gamer, I want the standard setting to be something I can play without having to switch my context to to the internet for help or a guide. This was one of many triumps of Baldur's Gate 3: the difficulty settings make sense in how they translate to gameplay, and the default is fun.
I think I disagree with your basic point, though what you say about normal vs. hard is funny. I'm fortunate enough to work with a UI/UX pro, and these things have right answers; they're incredibly obvious after they've been explained to you.
This can happen if they feel it’s easier or harder then expected.
If the game industry wasn't so myopic about recreating reality in graphics, the larger AAA titles could be exploring this more in depth. I think this would hit the jackpot of immersive experience as it could tap into the same psychological mechanisms.
I'd say that writers do know about this a lot, the problem is that games are becoming progressively more expensive and riskier to make, so money will push new titles to be safer and more boring, which could be why you perceive them as unaware of this, because why not wouldn't they want to make a good game?
However, this article reminded me of this meme
Trails games are even worse because there's tons of them who feel like they never gotten properly play tested. Killing a level 120 boss with a level 60 squad because you can delay the opponent's turn just isn't satisfying, especially when the boss is meant to be (narration-wise) so much stronger than you.
Multiplayer FPS, strategy games, and sport games are still very enjoyable without these mechanisms.
i know there are problems with this approach, but games without a difficulty setting “feel” more like a game to me for whatever reason
As with most art forms, the very best and most interesting examples treat rules like these as starting points, not end points.