If only Corvus made a round table discussion on difficulty when I was still actively playing Shiren the Wanderer, I could go on with so many tales of getting my ass killed. Oh well, as a hardcore gamer and hopefully future game designer, hitting the sweet spot for challenge is an admirable goal in my eye. These days quitting a game due to difficulty is not that rare, with numerous titles available it is easy to switch over to something else when things get too rough. Like most gamers I can be very picky about how hard a game should be.
As someone who spent hours playing Ninja Gaiden Black and getting through God of War’s god mode ( hardest difficulty level), I can say that there are two different degrees of challenge in most titles . Ninja Gaiden Black is what I call a constant difficulty or “fair hard”. In it there are no ifs, ands, or buts about the challenge, everyone from the first ninja you run into to the final demon at the end can and will kick your ass into the ground if you let them. This serves one very important purpose, to keep the player on his/her toes and to be teaching the player the various tactics and skills needed to survive. The difficulty curve in the beginning is huge, and for most players too big to get by, but I found the further I get the easier the game becomes with exception to the boss fights which I’ll be getting to now.
The boss fights in Ninja Gaiden Black are more of an ordeal however, they are made to challenge players in the ways of the old school action titles. Pattern recognition and quick reactions are the key to winning these fights. For the most part the first time you fight these guys it will end in failure, as you become acclimated to their attacks and tells. With each fight your gradually learning what you need to do to win. Which leads to two outcomes, either you get so fed up that you quit, or you eventually win. I do agree that not a lot of people find Ninja Gaiden Black’s high level of challenge fun, but I take it over God of War any day.
God of War while a hard game is not the same type of challenge like Ninja Gaiden Black in my opinion. God of War features an unbalanced difficulty curve and battles that are hard for the wrong reasons. Which I’ll be referring to as “cheap hard”, cheap hard is when the designers intentionally handicap the player to make fights hard or battles become difficult due to constraints of the game mechanics. The difficulty of God of War was never constant and I remember going through entire sections that were easy to only be stuck at one very hard section for some time. This keeps the player from learning tactics needed to survive and basically thrusts them into the fire without any guidance.
One annoyance I have with God of War and other titles like it, is that higher levels of difficulty = handicapping the player. For example of the right way of doing things, in Ninja Gaiden Black every difficulty level was basically a new game, with different item drops and new enemies to fight which meant you needed to improve your skills to take them. In God of War enemies became more durable and hit harder and that’s it. Your going to do the same exact thing except now you basically have a ball and chain on your leg. Encounters that were annoying on the earlier levels are now close to impossible with the odds stacked so much against you. When I play games on the harder levels, I want a challenge not to find my character has been reduced to nothingness. In other words, leave my weapons and tricks alone, and instead work on the enemies.
The other element of cheap hard is when the designers decide to go sadist on you and design fights that go against the game play system. For example in God of War there were tough enemies who could spawn smaller enemies if you left them alone, no big deal right? Except those small enemies could without warning grow and become the tough enemies and repeat the process over again. Due to the camera system and how his weapon was designed to focus on one direction made it difficult to hit everything to stop this process from taking place. Having attacks made off camera or in a way that the player can’t respond to them is another example of cheap hard. Then there are games that throw everything away for the final fight basically making what you did up to that section pointless, such as in the game Gun, the final boss fight made all your weapons useless and forced you into a puzzle fight to win. Another pet peeve of mine is when the difficulty of a section is due to a lack of checkpoints, such as in Metroid Prime 3 where the final boss fight is really 3 bosses in a row and dieing at any one of them requires you to start over again.
A game that has “fair hard” amount of challenge is one that I’m always feeling that I’m making progress in some way, even if it’s a few steps at a time. In GodHand every time you died and the level restarted, items repopulated the world giving you a chance to get more money or better items this time around making the restart hurt less, and you keep your current amount of money. RPGS however don’t have that sense of progress and becomes more like going face first into a wall which is one reason why I’m quicker to quit RPGS when I get stuck, as it always turns into “meet boss, it hits for 1000 damage, your party dies, enjoy 3 more hours of grinding”. So far the only RPG I’ve seen that avoids this is The World Ends With you.
TWEWY needs to be further explained on how to do difficulty right. The game rewards players for upping the challenge in a variety of ways and can be lowered at any time in case you bit off more then you can chew. I think TWEWY is a perfect example on how to balance a game so that newcomers can have an easy learning experience, while still pushing expert players to their limits.
Rogue Likes are another good example of fair hard, these games are hard, brutally hard yet fair. The rules are explained well and the difficulty adds a sense of tension while playing. Dieing in a rogue game is less from the designers being unfair and more often your fault or just having an unlucky run. Another reason why it is fair in Rogue Likes is due to the length of the game, you should (given a good run of items) be able to finish the main dungeon in about 30 minutes meaning you won’t be losing alot of time if you die.
While working on my latest game document for an action title I’ve already decided on how difficulty should work for it. With exception to the easy setting, the harder modes will not affect the player’s stats at all but instead will determine what tactics the enemies will use on the player. This means that the game will be hard, but once the player has gotten used to it, the game should become easier. Playing a game on the harder difficulty levels should offer a challenge, not an excuse to make the game unfair for the sake of it. Personality any game that offers difficulty levels, I wish could follow the Ninja Gaiden Black model by reshaping the game instead of just tweaking a few numbers for all the characters.
For the record I haven’t technically threw any controllers against the wall, I did spike them against the floor a few times, and came close to throwing a CD out the window once, other then that I consider myself even temper.
Josh
July 5th update: While I was thinking up another example of cheap hard from Metroid Prime 3, I thought up a clearer explanation of how I want designers to alter game difficulty. Enemy and player stats should not be changed when moving from normal to hard for example. Instead throw in new types of enemies to replace old ones, or a newer version that has different attacks. The other aspect is to make sure to retest the hardest sections of your game with the harder difficulty to check if the game is still balanced.
