Unrelated to the article, but keyboard scrolling is not working on this site. It seems to be deliberately disabled with a script called t1.js. I wonder why. Please, don't mess with keyboard navigation on a blog.
Making difficulty curves in games
21–30 of 92 posts
Re: Making difficulty curves in games
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Something like Dark Souls where an enemy is an enemy and it'll smash you if you're underleveled is so much more satisfying than something like Oblivion where enemy health inexplicably goes up based on your level. It also gives you the satisfaction of going back to earlier areas that were scary and laughing off the puny enemies.
Totally different when it comes to multiplayer matchmaking, though. There I wish games were even more aggressive and exact at matching you to players around your skill level. Nothing worse than casually sitting down after work for a quick multiplayer PVP game of any sort and getting totally annihilated by a streamer who plays 20 hours per day.
SBMM also a double-edged sword. Some people like to play game relaxed. Random matchmaking gives them chance to win.
But SBMM means having sweaty games all the time.
I do prefer SBMM but I’ve seen people upset about it
Re: Making difficulty curves in games
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
in games like wow where the more powerful you get the harder the enemies become, this reduces incentive to get more powerful. its a simple consequence so im not sure why they do it - probably to keep "time played" metric hovering at the desired level. which imho backfires when time played becomes 0.
You're only looking at one side. Dynamic difficulty also allows players to progress by lowering the health of a boss they've failed to beat for over two hours. Casual players giving up was a problem that no amount of shaming managed to fix ("haha skill issue, sucks to suck").
How is it a problem? Giving up is absolutely fine. Different games are made for different types of players. Who cares what the others think (or you think they think). By trying to cater to everyone you satisfy nobody.
Re: Making difficulty curves in games
#24This will depend on the game of course, but the best is when you can adjust the difficulty of mechanics individually. City builders do this a lot where you often have lots of difficulty settings you can adjust to tailor the game to your preferred playstyle. I’ll also say this: if you’re making a game and you add in a mechanic or mini-game that is not typical of the genre, make it optional or provide a way to skip it.…
Ghost Recon Breakpoint is a good example of lots of difficulty settings. You can turn off some annoying parts of the game, set enemy tactical difficulty, disable some survival aspects of the game if you don't care about them, and adjust the amount of on-screen information in several steps. For the latter part, you can have a minimap that shows the location of enemies once you've seen them, or not, and you can have waypoints that show the direction of some objective, or not. With all of the on-screen stuff disabled, there would be an awful lot of searching required to find objectives. It's pretty cool that everyone can have the amount of difficulty/frustration they desire.
Re: Making difficulty curves in games
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
in games like wow where the more powerful you get the harder the enemies become, this reduces incentive to get more powerful. its a simple consequence so im not sure why they do it - probably to keep "time played" metric hovering at the desired level. which imho backfires when time played becomes 0.
You're only looking at one side. Dynamic difficulty also allows players to progress by lowering the health of a boss they've failed to beat for over two hours. Casual players giving up was a problem that no amount of shaming managed to fix ("haha skill issue, sucks to suck").
Just make it a concrete option then. What is the point of being sneaky about it?
Re: Making difficulty curves in games
#26>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.
Ooh very much disagree. Like so many things, when it’s done right, it works real well, it feels good. See Deathloop for a recent example.
Re: Making difficulty curves in games
#27>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.
Left 4 Dead handled this pretty well in my opinion (i.e. mob spawning behind if you're playing too slowly or a tank in front if you're going too quick). I absolutely hated the dynamic adjusting in games like Mario Kart, though.
Re: Making difficulty curves in games
#28I've been watching a lot of let's play content on YouTube for incremental games (it's like an ASMR thing) and after watching a lot of these games it is clear that pacing a video game is a challenge. Sometimes the player finds a sneaky way to increase their progress that busts the game, other times they miss the correct path and get stuck in a painful grind. It is also very obvious when the game dev has targeted a pla…
Oddly specific niche jumpscare. Which games? Cookie clicker and universal paperclips are the household names, but reactor idle based off of ic2 has been my favorite gameplay-wise. The 2D adjacency bonus mechanics scratch the same itch tactical games have but without the stakes of messing up strategy.
Each game itself is mostly throw-away (although a few have some impressive graphics bling which must have taken some effort). I've been watching a channel called "Idle cub" [1] and he posts a new game every day (well, almost, sometimes he'll play a demo and then later the full game).
Seeing a massive stream of games that all surround the same 12 or so mechanics has been eye opening. The games range in duration from ~2 hours all the way to several days of content, although most premises seem to get old at around 4-6 hours.
At first I was doing research for my own game ideas, now I'm kind of mesmerized by the variety and the general relaxed atmosphere of these idle games.
Re: Making difficulty curves in games
#29>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.
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 all your resources though, the upcoming loot gets massively increased and you can usually get almost all of it back right away. I learned this partway through and completely changed my playstyle and really broke the immersion to see the game difficulty change in realtime. I reloaded a save and played differently, and the next area was filled with loot instead of empty. But when asking my friends what they thought, none of them noticed that the game was doing this, and they all thought it was well balanced.
On the other hand, some Mario games now will essentially have a "you are dying a lot, here is a star power up to help you out, or heres luigi to play the level for you" mechanic. For a super casual game, such a mechanic is great. Its optional. If you want to lock-in and beat the hard level, you can just not grab the powerup, or say no to the prompt. But if you are getting frustrated, you can skip the hard parts and fly through to the next level and get right back to having fun.
Re: Making difficulty curves in games
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally different when it comes to multiplayer matchmaking, though. There I wish games were even more aggressive and exact at matching you to players around your skill level. Nothing worse than casually sitting down after work for a quick multiplayer PVP game of any sort and getting totally annihilated by a streamer who plays 20 hours per day.
SBMM also a double-edged sword. Some people like to play game relaxed. Random matchmaking gives them chance to win. But SBMM means having sweaty games all the time. I do prefer SBMM but I’ve seen people upset about it
People who complain about SBMM being "sweaty" are typically stronger players who want to dunk on casuals. For them, it's true that non-SBMM is sweaty, because if you're even a top 10% player, you're gonna dominate most other people.
But what if you're a bottom 10% player? How non-sweaty is non-SBMM then? Is it not-sweaty to get absolutely demolished all the time even at your best?