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Making difficulty curves in games

davetech.co.uk

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61–70 of 92 posts

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#61

Post by bashmelek »

orbital-decay wrote: post #8

>Dynamically adjust the difficulty depending on how well the player is doing. 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.

Crash Bandicoot did this well. In the original game, you needed to finish without dying and get all of the boxes to get the gem. In future games, some levels would have a “death path” that would only be available if you got to a certain point in the level without dying.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#63

Post by SukadarBukadar »

safwat-halaby wrote: post #50
orbital-decay wrote: post #8

>Dynamically adjust the difficulty depending on how well the player is doing. 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.

It doesn't have to be deceptive! 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 C…

IIRC, the playtime is also a factor in Factorio. It's nice that the trees soak up pollution, but the inability to plant more of them is actually the only thing I really dislike about the game. I want to have a choice to be even greener and even less disruptive to the local inhabitants in the base game, not as a mod "hack"

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#64

Post by gchamonlive »

proc0 wrote: post #56

I haven't seen this connection made, but difficulty curves in video games seem to resemble Campbell's Hero's Journey. There is an initial call to adventure, then some kind of mentor, then confronting the shadow, then a return of the shadow, etc. 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…

That's because the hero's journey is an attempt to study the physiology of story telling, so it's not restricted to the typical written romance. Games just like books and movies are often trying to tell a story and it'll eventually follow Campbell's book, even if unaware or not trying to.

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?

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#65

Post by psvv »

This is an okay introduction, but it shouldn't be considered prescriptive.

As with most art forms, the very best and most interesting examples treat rules like these as starting points, not end points.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#66

Post by nsxwolf »

orbital-decay wrote: post #8

>Dynamically adjust the difficulty depending on how well the player is doing. 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.

I like when your character or your party feels like superheroes for a little while after leveling up, then it gets harder to really test your new ability, then keep repeating that cycle.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#67

Post by orbital-decay »

qwery wrote: post #57
orbital-decay wrote: post #8

>Dynamically adjust the difficulty depending on how well the player is doing. 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.

"actual players" as opposed to other people who just, what? "use" the game? 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.

As opposed to the game designer who came up with an idea that sounds convincing but barely ever tested it. My comment had nothing to do with "git gud", it's poorly worded perhaps.

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.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#68

Post by hnuser123456 »

qwery wrote: post #58
snailmailman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This depends a lot on the game and the situation. If hidden well enough i suspect it can play well. I really enjoyed the difficulty of Half Life Alyx for instance. I was saving my resources carefully because they seemed very sparse. 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 a…

The Alyx example is interesting, because I see that system as being designed to avoid breaking immersion. Specifically, to avoid entering an "unwinnable" state i.e. where the player restarts from a save/checkpoint. I do understand how noticing the underlying system can pull you out of the game though.

Intuitively, people want to save up ammo because they never know when there's gonna be a big fight, and they don't want to be caught low on ammo.

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.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#69

Post by throwatdem12311 »

orbital-decay wrote: post #8

>Dynamically adjust the difficulty depending on how well the player is doing. 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.

Hard disagree. All of my favourite games of all time have dynamic difficulty systems.

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.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#70

Post by __alexs »

SukadarBukadar wrote: post #63
safwat-halaby wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to be deceptive! 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 C…

IIRC, the playtime is also a factor in Factorio. It's nice that the trees soak up pollution, but the inability to plant more of them is actually the only thing I really dislike about the game. I want to have a choice to be even greener and even less disruptive to the local inhabitants in the base game, not as a mod "hack"

You can plant trees now.
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