For a long time, games have come with various difficulty options. The purpose of this is fairly clear: if the game’s too difficult, it’s so frustrating most players will rage quit. If it’s too easy, it won’t provide enough of a challenge to be fun. But there’s rarely a single difficulty that works for everyone. Some people just want to feel like John Rambo tearing trough enemies like knife trough butter, and don’t care about a challenge. Others are masochists and love making their lives hard while playing games. The solution? Let people choose the difficulty!
Of course, for some games the difficulty is such an integral part of the experience that changing it completely breaks the experience. FromSoftware’s Souls games are a popular example of this: the games are quite simply made for the most hardcore of players, so making the games harder makes them impossible, and making the games any easier robs them of the very thing that makes players love them.
But back to games that do leave a lot of room for tweaking the difficulty…
How do you do it?
Well, there are some approaches, with pros and cons, and I want to go over some of the examples that I think are great, and some of the examples that I don’t think should be replicated.
Tweaking Damage Values
No.
Okay, okay, I’ll explain. Tweaking damage values is probably the simplest, and thus most common way to change the difficulty. Usually this works by causing the player to deal more damage and take less damage on easier difficulty options, while on harder difficulty options you take more damage and deal less damage.
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that this sucks. For making the game easier it works well enough, but for making the game harder it just makes the game feel unfair. You end up with a weapon tearing you apart in a single hit while wielded by an enemy, then that same weapon becoming a toy when you get it. Some people might find this fun, somehow, but for most people it just ends up frustrating, so if you’re making a game, I’d say avoid this.
Same game but with thoughtful tweaks
This one is, in my opinion, one of the best way to make a game harder. Metroid Zero Mission did just this for its hard difficulty option.
Enemies are more numerous, often of tougher varieties, energy, missile, super missile, and power bomb tanks are smaller, and in the latter parts of the game some save stations are outright removed.
Yes, I know I just bitched about tweaking numbers being horseshit, stfu, this way of tweaking numbers is different. How? Well, the former one literally introduces new rules that specifically affect you. You specifically deal less damage and take more damage for the same attacks. If you halve the HP and ammo gains, however, the game doesn’t feel unfair, it feels tough. You steal deal and take the same damage, but have less ammo and HP to spare.
Introducing new mechanics
By far my favourite. The prime example I have for this is Skyrim’s Survival Mode. I’ve already written a whole article about it, so I won’t go into too much detail, but the important points are these.
Survival Mode still does some number tweaking to make things harder, but the real special sauce is the new mechanics it introduces. You now have to manage your hunger, temperature, and fatigue. Diseases can now progress to more severe variations if untreated. Raw meat can give you food poisoning. All of this ends up recontextualising some old mechanics as well. The Ring of Namira which used to be just a neat item to get is now one of the most valuable resources in the game, as it allows for easier feeding. Lycantropy and Vampirism have a role in managing hunger now as well.
I won’t drool over how much I like Survival Mode for the rest of the article, not when I’ve already done that, but the key takeaway is that Survival Mode makes the game harder by introducing new mechanics. This ends up forcing you to approach the game in different ways, which can be a breath of fresh air for returning players hungry for a new challenge.
And now for level scaling
I could have talked about this together with difficulty options, but I didn’t in part because it comes with its own set of challenges and ways to mess it up.
So, what is level scaling? It’s an issue mostly encountered by open ended games such as The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, or Terraria. Generally speaking, it works by making things more difficult as you become more powerful. This comes with its own set of issues, as it can make the game’s difficulty feel too easy at low levels and too difficult at higher levels.
The ways to tackle it are largely the same as regular difficulty scaling, but a bit more complex.
Scale their stats according to the player’s
The easiest way to do it, but of course this also ends up feeling cheap, and risks the difficulty being all over the place. Either too easy in the beginning and too hard in the late game, or too hard early on and too easy as you progress.
One great example of this going awry is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Enemies scale according to your character level, but you don’t. Your abilities scale according to your Skill levels and attribute levels. The issues? Your character level scales somewhat linearly with only some of your skills, namely your major and minor skills. But what if you only use miscellaneous skills? Then your skills level up, but your character level won’t. Another issue is that a level up can give you anywhere between 1 and 5 points for the 3 attribute increases you get each level. This means that by level 10 you can get anywhere between 30 and 150 points added to your attributes. Quite the wide gap, isn’t it?
Of course, you can start taking the player’s actual stats into account, or do away with stats and only have a single character level that all XP adds up to, but in the end you are likely to run into some variation of the exact issue I outlined with Oblivion, even if maybe not at quite the same scale.
Tie progression of both the player and enemies to events.
This one doesn’t work for all games, but I think it’s worth talking about. The main game I’ve seen do this is Terraria, so that’s what I’ll use as an example.
Terraria does away with levels. There are 2 main stats associated with the player: HP and MP. Both can be increased permanently up to a certain limit by consumable items. Once you reach that limit, your HP is simply at the highest it can get, but your MP can be increased a bit more by equipment with special bonuses.
So, how does the player actually progress? By finding or crafting better equipment. Crafting that equipment, of course, requires gathering the resources, either found in the world or farmed from enemies. And this is where the secret lies. The game can lock both stronger enemies and better resources for the player to use behind specific events, usually boss fights. You kill the Wall of Flesh? Well now the world is filled with stronger monsters but also lots of new materials for you to use, not to mention the stuff you’ll gather from the new enemies. Defeat one or more of the Mechanical Bosses? Even stronger enemies, and even better equipment are now available to the player.
This approach doesn’t work for all games, of course. While Terraria gives you a sandbox that you’re free to explore as you wish, it remains a fundamentally very linear game in its progression. Trying to apply this same kind of progression to a game such as The Elder Scrolls or Fallout would quite simply never work. But what if your game is a more linear, open world experience? Then I think Terraria has some good ideas on how to balance difficulty and progression.
Closing Notes
This post’s another one of my signature “I wrote this entirely on impulse in one go then posted it”, but hey, I’ve actually been meaning to write about this for a while so I’m glad I finally did. :D
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