#guilelessmonk

Defining our Terms

Broadly, aspirational difficulty is how well you have to be able to play to win, and continuous difficulty is how well you have to play to not lose. These are similar to the concepts of skill ceiling and skill floor but are different in some important ways. 

Skill ceiling is the cap on how good at a game you can be. For example, Tic Tac Toe is a game with a low skill ceiling as it is very easy to be as good at that game as it is possible to be. Aspirational difficulty isn't how good at a game you can be but rather how good at a game you have to be, even if only for a moment, to be able to win or accomplish a goal in the game.

I've never been good at darts but sometimes I'll try throw darts at the bullseye to see if I can hit it. There are no points, I'm not playing against anyone, and there isn't a limit on how many tries I get (outside of my own patience). I just throw dart after dart at the board and try to hit the bullseye. If this counts as a game is another discussion entirely but it is a good example of a pure kind of aspirational difficulty. I'm just trying to do something that is hard to do and I win when I've done that hard thing. It doesn't matter how bad at it I am the first 99 tries if I hit it on the 100th.

Compare that form of difficulty to getting the infamous "Art" ending to the Stanley Parable. To get this ending you have to spend 2 hours pushing a button and then spend another 2 hours going back and forth to press 2 different buttons. Pushing the buttons is easy, even when there are 2 of them and you have to go back and forth to press the buttons. This is, on a mechanical level, very very easy to do.

Save the virtual cardboard baby from the fire!

But despite how easy this is very few people are willing to put in the work to get this ending because you have to spend 4 hours pushing buttons and if you screw it up you have to start all over again. At no single point is this difficult, but doing it continuously for 4 straight hours is unbearably hard to do. This is continuous difficulty. It doesn't ask you to do anything amazing in the way aspirational difficulty does, rather it sets a limit on how bad you are allowed to be. Skill floor is about your mechanical ability to press the button, the continuous difficulty is that you have to press that button every few seconds for hours on end.

Both at once

Very few games only use one or the other, I had to pull some strange examples to show relatively pure forms of each. While games use both it is worth understanding them apart from each other so we can better talk about how they work together.

For example: in Cuphead there is a lot of continuous difficulty that comes from having to avoid enemy attacks. Being good at dodging attacks will never win you the fight, but you have to be at least okay at dodging attacks to give yourself enough time to damage the enemy. It is also worth nothing that the aspirational difficulty in this game isn't much higher then the lower bar set by the continuous difficulty. Enemies tend to be very large and easy to hit with your ranged attacks. That said there is a great deal of aspirational difficulty in using your parry to get additional super meter and this mechanic makes each fight a great deal more interesting as each parryable object is a chance for you to try and do some amazing stunts.

Players tend to experience continuous difficulty as stress as it is a constant unrelenting pressure. Stress has negative connotations but it isn't necessarily a bad thing in this context. A game that provides no or insufficient stressors sounds relaxing but it can just as easily be unbearably boring especially when that lower bar is the only form of difficulty the game provides.

Compare this to a game like Super Mario Odyssey which has a low amount of continuous difficulty. It is much less demanding and screw ups aren't a big deal. That said, you can pull of some amazing platforming if you push yourself to find creative solutions to the game’s various problems. The game not only allows you to pull of some amazing tricks but recognizes and rewards you for doing so by hiding caches of coins in places that you "shouldn't" be able to reach. I would describe Super Mario Odyssey as a game with low continuous difficulty but high aspirational difficulty if you really want to 100% it.

How are you making a game harder/easier

Now that we have a basic understanding of the difference between continuous and aspirational difficulty, and how most games comprise a mix of both, lets talk about difficulty levels. If we wanted to make an easier version of a game do we want to lower both continuous and aspirational difficulty or perhaps only one of them?

In a FPS game like Doom (2016) lower continuous difficulty might mean giving the player more health, making enemies less aggressive or giving them fewer attack patterns. Lowering aspirational difficulty might mean being more helpful with the auto-aim, enlarging hit-boxes (especially for head shots), or making enemies move slower/less-erratically. 

In many games continuous difficulty maps to defense (how many times you can get hit, how hard it is to avoid getting hit...) and aspirational difficulty maps to offense (how hard it is to hit enemies). This isn't always true, and many individual acts for both attack and defense contain combinations of both continuous and aspirational difficulty, but I felt this was worth noting.

Let’s examine the classic example of how to make a game harder: making enemies bullet sponges (giving enemies tons of health). In making enemies bullet sponges you aren't making them any harder to hit, you are simply making it so you have to hit them more. This is an increase in the continuous difficulty but not in the aspirational difficulty. You don't have to get better at shooting enemies to win here, you just have to do it for a longer period of time. If made without other shifts in aspirational difficulty this will change the feel of the game by putting a greater focus on doing the same things over and over again. A different solution here might be giving the enemy some kind of armor that the player has to aim around in order to deal damage. This would make it harder to kill enemies while preventing fights from becoming long slogs, though it would require additional art assets and visual/sound cues to convey to the player when they aren’t dealing damage which is a large trade off.

When changing a game’s difficulty level you generally want to preserve how the game feels which would mean lowering/raising both continuous and aspirational difficulty in roughly equal measures. Doing this well means that to a player that is generally less skilled the game will get the same feeling out of the game as a better player would get out of a harder version of the game. 

So?

There are many more kinds of difficulty. A game can challenge your reflexes, memory, perception, or any number of other things. The goal here isn't to say that there are only 2 kinds of difficulty, rather to try and understand two broad classifications of difficulty and how they interact.

We often just say a game is difficult (or like Dark Souls) but difficultly has too many complexities for it to be comfortably put under a single label. Understanding the different ways in which a game can be difficult, and that different forms of difficulty effect players in different ways, allows us to better understand how to create the specific kind of tension we want in players of all skill levels.

Now, in motion, people tend to get a handle on this system pretty quick. It sounds -and is- really complicated but they do a good job of conveying on screen what is happening with the Turn points and so it isn't something players have to spend a great deal of time studying up on. It has fantastically interesting battle and team composition implications that rewards players who really dig into the mechanics of how this system works. But it is still just really complicated and all that complication is front loaded on the player because having a working understanding of this system is a requirement for any progression.

Now, lets jump forward in the series a bit to Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3. Persona 3 doesn't have the Turn Press battle system, it has a more standard/bland turn based system. Everyone gets their own turn every round. The series has left behind the Turn Press battle system, but if we look closely we can still see the gameplay patterns that defined the Turn Press system all over the place.

In Persona 3 if a character gets a crit then they get to go again. They can keep doing this, landing crits and going again as many times per turn as they please but they only get an extra turn the first time they crit against each enemy. If you are fighting 5 enemies who are weak to fire you can hit each with their very own fire spell, but hitting them again will gain you nothing (other than the damage).

Hitting an enemy with a crit inflicts them with a status called "Down", and you can't get an extra turn off a downed enemy. Downed enemies do take more damage though.

This is basically what happens with the Turn Press system, except without all that overt complexity. Get in a good attack, go again, with a cap on how many times you can attack. One big difference between the 2 systems though is that in Persona 3 the character who earned an extra turn is always the one who uses it, that is not the case in Nocturne. In Nocturne there a set order in which teammates take their turns. If you get an extra turn the one who gets to take that turn will be the first in the order, and the second and so on. In Persona 3 each character earns their own extra turns while in Nocturne you earn extra an turn for the team. 

Fights in Persona 3 have a greater tendency to be taken over by a single character on your team who happens to have the spell all the enemies are weak against. They have a ice spell and all the enemies are weak to ice, so that character casts ice 5 times and the battle is over. In Nocturne this same situation would make that character the star of the fight but based on how they are positioned in the line up you might have to do some strategic turn passing in order to get them a chance to attack even twice per round.

Each character gets the chance to shine even brighter in Persona 3 but they also can't share the spotlight the way you can in Nocturne. In Nocturne you can earn another character an extra turn so that they can cast a heal spell. Or you can pass your turn to a teammate so that they can be the one to attack. The basic pattern is there, but a lot of the complex team dynamics that come from it are gone.

To help bring the focus back towards the team Persona 3 introduces team attacks, where if all enemies are down (have been hit with a crit) then you can attack all the enemies as a group for a lot of damage. Persona 3 doesn't want to be a game about strong individuals but a game about a team.

The battle mechanics in Persona 3 often mimic specific effects of the Turn Battle system while trying to avoid the outright weird complexity of it. But the game isn’t just attempting to simplify the mechanics of the Turn Press battle system because the game adds in a whole host of its own complexities and twists to battle that were never present in Nocturne. In many ways adding in new complexities to the game was only possible because it removed the Turn Press battle system which, while interesting, was so hugely costly in terms of burdensome complexity that it crowded out the chance to add in different sources of complexity.

Another way Persona 3 mimics the Turn Press system is if a character misses a melee attack in Persona 3 then they get the down status which takes another turn to recover. This mimics the fact that a missed attack in the Turn Press System took up 2 turns. In the re-release Persona 3 Portable getting up from "Down" doesn't take an extra turn.

I'll miss the Turn Press system. It was weird, complex, and interesting. But I won't miss it too much because while it is officially gone many of the gameplay implications that helped make it so interesting continue to live on in the Shin Megami Tensei games. It hasn’t died, rather evolved. It shed a lot of the overt and up front complexity that might turn people away while keeping much of what made it great, and where we miss out on some interesting interactions and depth we can add some back in with other mechanics.

It continues to evolve. Persona 3 is just the one I touched on here but the system and reward patterns that defined the Turn Press battle system keep growing and changing in the Shin Megami Tensei series. 

Making the game fun and challenging yet beatable for P2 is fairly straight forward, you just give them P1's progress. P2 falls in a pit but P1 is just fine so a couple of seconds later you just re-spawn P2 near P1. This means that they get to try every challenge but they never get stuck on any of them provided P1 can beat it. They also get to feel helpful as often player P1 will die from negligence or from over aggression and P2 gets to be the hero just by living or possibly doing what P1 couldn't.

Even though we are giving P2 P1's progress we still can't balance the game around the skill level of P1. If the game is to far above P2's skill level then they won't get to feel like they are playing the game or adding anything. If some parts are to hard and they must rely on P1 that is fine, but that reliance must not be a constant thing else P2 will get frustrated because at that point they might as well just watch P1 play the game.

Making the game interesting for P1 though -when they are significantly better then what the game demands of them- is more complicated. We want to make it interesting for P1 but we just we can't balance around their skill level without basically cutting P2 out of the game. The game is already going to be full of tiny optional things for the player to grab and do: coins and power ups to collect, enemies to kill, stars and stamps to find. But just having those things for the player to do isn't the same as incentivising the player to push themselves to go after them. They will be drawn to simply helping their friend along -as they are right there with them- and as such not push themselves. The fact that a game could potentially be fun to play doesn't mean the game is actually fun to play.

So how does Super Mario 3D World make the game more interesting for better players? It gives them a crown!

A crown. Singular. Up to 4 people and a single crown.

At the end of each level the points each player got are tallied up and the player with the most points gets a crown. The player who wins the crown gets to wear it in the next level, and whoever finishes the level while wearing gets an extra 5,000 points. If you get hit while wearing the crown you drop it and it becomes a scramble to pick it up again as everyone goes after it.

It is shiny, pointless, and I want it.

Collecting Green Stars and the like are communal goals, so while there might be an incentive for the group to get them there is less incentive for each individual to want to personally go that extra mile. Make it a competition though -with status as the reward- and people will want to go after it. Yet because it is a cosmetic thing without game play implications it doesn't prevent people from cooperating. While effecting nothing, the crown changes everything. The goal is to give people something to do, while not overly pitting their interests against each other.

This isn't a new concept to games, Zombie's Ate My Neighbors on the SNES would track how many points each player got and give a run down at the end of the level. The addition of the crown just gives a more constant reminder of status and something else to fight over while making your way through the levels.

When playing online with people anomalously this competition can turn sour pretty quickly though, even if it is for purely cosmetic things. For single screen games like Super Mario 3D World or Zombie's Ate My Neighbors -which are played with friends/family while sitting in the same room- it is great.

In FFX everyone basically had their own job but they all existed on the same "Sphere Grid" and so were technically all able to learn all abilities. This makes each character much more adaptable (in an a-la cart sense) but it also means that every job has to share a basic mechanical vocabulary. Things like "Items" and "Attack" that everyone needs to be able to do something when they run out of mana. So even if a character had a shitty attack that was basically pointless it had to be there taking up space on the UI. 

The job adaptability in FFX-2 means we can drop things like basic attacks off of jobs like White/Black Mages. "Attack" on the various mage jobs is basically wasted UI space because of how weak those classes are physically. In FFX-2 if you are a mage and you want to "Attack" you have to change job, which you easily can at any time. 

Removing useless commands and generally cleaning up the UI is important especially since the game uses the ATB System and so battles happen in real time. Scrolling through a hundred spells every time you want to attack is boring when the game waits patiently for you, when it doesn't wait it is boring in a frustrating way.

You can't change to any job though, only certain ones. Each character equips a set of jobs and relationships between these jobs called a "Garment Grid".

Each job is a different node on the grid and you can only transform into adjacent nodes.

This adds a new level to the complexity to the job customization because now you have to figure out which jobs you are going to want to use and which ones you are likely to need to switch between. Is the plan to start out Yuna as Thief and then once you have robbed them blind change into a Black Mage or a Gunner (depending on the enemy's weakness) while keeping the option of White Mage open in case you need some extra healing? You'll want to be able to change back into a Thief if you run out of mana so that you can steal some MP which means you will want to keep White Mage and Back Mage adjacent to Thief. Not all Garment Grids will let you have all of those jobs next to each other and so you will have to choose which transitions you are willing to have take an extra turn or two.

We aren't done yet though because there is even more to Garment Grids. Some grids have additional benefits you can unlock by going from one specific node to another. These upgrades can be stats, effects, spells, or access to another job's abilities regardless of what job you currently are. Different Grids give you a different number of nodes, different numbers of connections, and different effects for moving between jobs. The game is encouraging you to keep switching your job through out the fight, to change with the fight and adapt to what is currently happening. The game encourages arbitrary changes by giving you buffs for changing.

Each character also has a super job that they can only activate after having used all jobs on their grid in this battle.

You unlock new abilities for each job by using that job in battle. You steal as a Thief and you get a bit of exp towards whatever Thief ability/skill you are currently trying to learn. Eventually, through enough use of that job you get enough exp and unlock that ability. Then you pick a new ability to learn and the cycle continues until you run out of abilities for that job. Each job only has so many abilities and as there are a lot of jobs each individual job has relatively low ceiling on how much exp is needed to master it (unlocked all of its abilities). You won't max out every job for every character by the end of the game, far from it, but you will likely max out a couple along the way. Once you have mastered a job any exp gained by using that job goes to waste. This is probably my biggest problem with this job system.

After having mastered a job using that job is wasteful as that exp does nothing. I really like it when a game encourages the player to diversify their playstyle. I think it is an important thing to do in order to keep the game feeling fresh, and keep the player learning and growing. But with this exp system the second a character reaches the zenith of a job then using that job becomes a last ditch option due to the waste inherent in using it after it has been mastered. 

The player mastered that job though heavy use and probably used it heavily because they really liked using that job. Now they can't regularly use it because of the incentive structure on job advancement. The lost exp could of course be made up for by grinding but grinding as punishment for use of your favorite job seems like a jerk thing to do (also I’m against arbitrary grinding).

Before anyone tries to defend this exp system by saying that "You don't need to learn more than 1 or 2 jobs and so wasting that exp doesn't matter" please understand that is worse. If the player doesn't have to learn any new skills or abilities after the first half of the game, then that is a much deeper problem then the player not being able to play their favorite class without having to worry that they will have to grind later to make up for using it.

The goal should be to incentivise a diversity of playstyles, even force it a little bit, but don't punish the player for having a favorite playstyle. I agree that we shouldn’t let the player only use one playstyle, but this exp system feels like the game is saying you are done with any job you have mastered job and probably should never use it again. 

I think that exp shouldn't go to waste but that begs the question: where should it go? We could let the player assign where it goes, "Send all the extra exp I got from using mastered classes to Dark Knight please." The player might use other jobs then because they just got new abilities in that job and what them to give them a whirl, but I don't think this is a strong enough inventive to get them to try other jobs. I think instead of letting them choose where that exp goes it should go into a pool that is used to buy random abilities from other classes. The player doesn't get to choose what they get, but they get something and so nothing is wasted. This lets us keep the incentive of new abilities as a reason to play other jobs and means that if they really want to master a specific job or ability they have to use that job. They can still use their favorite classes without being wasteful but they still need to specifically use other classes in order to bring out that jobs full potential.