#difficulty settings

When VVVVVV and Super Meat Boy came out in 2010, they were radical departures from established concepts of game difficulty. Games used to have autosave or save slots, but also lives and health, so that when you overwrote your save in a low-health state you could paint yourself into a corner. Other games had regenerating health, or let you restart over and over from the last checkpoint.

Instead, VVVVVV and Super Meat Boy both had a binary state of life or death. Every hazard was lethal. In VVVVVV, the landscape was riddled with autosave checkpoints. Super Meat Boy was difficult, but levels were short. Restarting was instantaneous. There was no "Game Over" screen, no death animation that could not be skipped, just getting back into the action instantly with a single button press. Most importantly, unlike Super Mario World, neither game has a penalty for dying 50 times in a row.

Super Meat Boy could have been different, with lives and mushrooms and coins, and when you are low on of lives, you might be tempted to go back to the equivalent of "Donut Plains" to farm some 1UP mushrooms. But Super Meat Boy was innovating on Super Mario World by being easier in one way and much, much more difficult in another. There is a very different concept of difficulty, failure, and losing.

Instead of being “easier”, these games took the sting out of failure states, and got the player back into the game quickly.

When I am making a game, I try to focus the difficulty into the game's core gameplay, and in the core loop. If it's a puzzle game, I want the puzzles to be difficult and engaging, not the stuff around it, and I don't want the player to be able to grind his way through the meat of the game by spending effort on all the other parts. That means I'd rather make a boss fight just a little more forgiving by default than give the player the option to grind. I’d rather make platforming easier in order to put emphasis on puzzles.

In my experience, about nine times out of ten, when you identify a difficult section in the game during playtesting, it needs to be dealt with for players of all skill levels. The solution is rarely to just give the player “more health” to tank the hits. It’s usually better to more clearly telegraph what is required to overcome the challenge, to put the required tutorialisation earlier in the game, or to re-design the level/boss/timings/attacks for all skill levels. During playtests, I have often observed players struggle and fail at a certain point because they tried the wrong strategy over and over convinced that they could win by executing their flawed strategy perfectly rather than thinking of an alternative.

Some games can't have difficulty settings. I can think of some persuasive games, for example Depression Quest, Dys4ia, and You Have To Burn The Rope, whose central idea would be undermined by difficulty settings. I can also think of un-gamey interactive experiences such as Proteus, The Stanley Parable, Mountain, or Windosill, where difficulty is just not applicable.

In cases in which difficulty is applicable, there is rarely only one way to implement it. The Curse of Monkey Island had a "regular" mode and a "harder mode" with more puzzles, but no "easy mode". The different difficulty settings in Mobility change the game's goals and platforming mechanics. The difficulty settings in VVVVVV slow down the game by up to 40%. You could give characters more health, more lives, drop more loot, change the sizes of hitboxes, remove obstacles from levels, let the player jump farther, or make the enemy AI stupid.

More drastic interventions like increased jump distance can turn easy mode in a completely different game, such that getting better at easy mode won't help with normal mode. With increased jump distance in a platformer, solutions that work in hard mode might not even work in easy mode either.

Other games have a different focus. Nuclear Throne is a coffebreak action roguelike-like about dying and retrying. If there was an "easy mode" and a save/reload function, players might be tempted to crank the difficulty so low they can beat the game in one run. This is clearly not what the designers intended. Vlambeer's next game Luftrausers was even more explicitly focused on dying and retrying.

Reasoning like “so that players of all skill levels can complete the game like the designer intended“ implies that the designer intended the player to beat the game in the first place. Saying “all games should have difficulty settings“ is an expression of a certain expectation of what games “should“ be, and definitely incompatible with moral objections to the term “walking simulator“.

Ending a run of Papers, Please in starvation and poverty is just as “valid“ as doing your duty for Arstozka, just as valid as getting caught helping dissidents, just as valid as buying fake documents and fleeing. Still, it’s conceivable that such a game could have difficulty settings - but it doesn’t need to.

Balance your game so that the difficulty lies in the core gameplay, not in minigames, movement, or ancillary mechanics. Limit the downsides of failing minigames.

Re-work situations that are too difficult, rather than giving the player “more health“. Make it easier to dodge or seek cover rather than tank hits. Make sure the player knows which parts are supposed to be difficult, and what is impossible. Tell the player the information necessary to beat the next challenge - unless the challenge is a riddle. These changes often solve the same problem that difficulty levels would solve. Corollary: Remove grinding and resource hoarding when possible.

If applicable, rethink your failure states, implied failure states, save system, penalties for losing, ease of restarting, distance from save points, and permanent progression.

The part I liked best is how Aranock explains how difficulty settings also benefit hardcore gamers.

So, I've made my thoughts and feelings on challenge and the meaning of it in the context of video games clear during my ramblings so I'll try not to repeat myself too much. But for anyone who doesn't want, care or feel invested enough to read anything else I've written I'll summarize it here; A challenge is something the player is presented with and should learn to overcome using their own skills and the tools the game presents them with. It shouldn't be a brick wall they have to hope for RNG to pass through, it's not something they should just have to wait out until the game says “Okay, you have the right numbers for this to happen” you, the player, should have a say in how you overcome the challenge and be summarily rewarded for overcoming it.

But what is difficulty, and how does that factor into a game? People often say things like “Dark Souls is too hard!” and action games will present a new player with a host of difficulty options, but deep down what does any of that even mean and where does it come from? Generally speaking “Harder” in the context of a difficulty setting doesn't mean much. Enemies will hit you harder, you will do less damage, things will have more HP. But is that really harder? Is that a challenge in any way? If you can beat easy or normal without getting hit, would hard present any difference in challenge to you? Does dying in one hit, and the bosses taking twice as many hits to kill really make a difference in a game that you already know how to play well? In my experience, not really. So why play these harder modes at all?

Well, rewards for one thing. Before the advent of DLC the most common way to hide unlockable content was to set it behind the hardest difficulty mode. Congratulations, you beat the game on the most tedious difficulty, have a costume to play with on any repeat games. But that never really made sense because once you're done with the hardest setting, interest in replaying a game tends to tank. Now that DLC is a thing hard difficulty modes tend to only reward achievements and ego. Achievements have long been criticized for having no point other than as an arbitrary scoring system that has replaced more traditional in-game content unlocks for years now, and they ultimately add nothing yet people feel compelled to start a game on its hardest difficulty just to get the achievement for it.

Now, you might think there's no harm in that surely. What someone does with their own game is their own deal. And you would be correct, it shouldn't matter what someone does with their own game in their own time. The problem is that people give games unnecessarily bad reputations because they can't keep up with a harder difficulty they platy solely for their own ego. Take recent release Nier Automata for example. The game warns you it has no auto-save feature and you can change the difficulty any time, even mid-combat. There's no achievement for playing on a harder difficulty. On top of that, it's developer Yoko Taro is fairly infamous for trolling completionist or egotistical players with ridiculous tasks for minimal achievements or rewards. Yet people play on the hardest difficulty, fail over and over again and complain that the game is awful because they can't win. Automata isn't the first game similar things have happened to. Developers get pressured into putting harder difficulty modes into their game for no reason other than to appease the self-fellating hardcore fanbase who then complain enemies are unbalanced, have too much HP and then the base game -the game as it was intended- suffers publicly for it.

So, where does this idea of difficulty in games even come from? Well that stems largely from older games such as the NES. They had a reputation for being difficult and hard to beat through a combination of design and tech limitations and an arcade mindset. See, arcade games were designed so that you would put quarter after quarter into them. Many arcade games didn't have a proper ending to them, they would simply restart once you achieved the goal, and even more of them were designed in such a way that it was near impossible to beat them without dying. Many arcade games were shamelessly designed with the quarter mentality in mind and gave bosses screen-wide attacks that were near impossible to dodge, used mechanics that killed your own character with every special attack, or just dropped enemies in front of you so often that it was hard to react in time. These things didn't make the games literally impossible to beat without spending money, but you had to spend a lot of time memorizing the game if you wanted to. Which meant spending a lot of money playing it.

In general older games followed the arcade design. Many NES games even still had leftover “insert coin” text  in them. The continues system replaced quarters but ultimately games were very similar. Players were presented with scenarios where they were forced to memorize games through constant playthroughs and often nearly impossible to predict losses to finish them. The games themselves were usually incredibly short, forcing developers to rely on these tactics to make their games last for more than an afternoon. Beloved classics like the early megaman games only take an hour or two to complete if you know how to beat them already. But a new player will struggle far longer because they simply don't know how to cope with things like platforms that vanish under their character, or objects that instantly kill them without warning.

As technology progressed, the mindset of developers changed as well. Games don't need to rely on this sort of thing anymore. A game can be as long or short as a developer wants it to be. A game can have proper challenge, it can teach a player how to overcome a scenario and let them grow without having to act like they're paying quarters still. Even the lives and continues systems have mostly been phased out, barring the “faux-retro” games that have been making rose-tinted homages to old games.