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Making difficulty curves in games

davetech.co.uk

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Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#51

Post by hlynurd »

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…

A big advantage of this system is the transparency. You understand the logic behind it so it doesn't feel like someone is trying to trick you.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#52

Post by sph »

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.

On the other hand, the whole Director system of Left 4 Dead works like this and it’s incredible.

https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/2009/ai_system...

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#53

Post by pibaker »

snailmailman wrote: post #29
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.

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…

> 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.

Sounds like the design is working as intended?

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#54

Post by raincole »

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's a pretty well proven design pattern.

The adage is that the customers never know what they want, and it's doubly true when it comes to video games.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#55

Post by proc0 »

nkrisc wrote: post #6

This 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.…

This works for sandbox or simulation type games, but otherwise I think difficulty sliders are like going to a restaurant and getting all the cooked ingredients in separate plates for you to combine. While that can be fine and cater to the maximum number of people, it's a safe approach that wastes good opportunity cost of a great plate of food catered by someone with the skills to do it.

If a game can afford a designers to really think what the experience should be, I think the gold standard should be no difficulty slider. Playing the game should be a self-consistent experience that gets more difficult as you get better at the game, and gating the final content with skills is very rewarding and makes the experience feel more "real" than if you just get a super configurable game where everything can be turned on/off.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#56

Post by proc0 »

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 immersive experience as it could tap into the same psychological mechanisms.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#57

Post by qwery »

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.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#58

Post by qwery »

snailmailman wrote: post #29
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.

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.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#59

Post by TGower »

lelanthran wrote: post #48
bob1029 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why Diablo 4 was a complete flop.

> This is why Diablo 4 was a complete flop. This is interesting to me; can you explain please?

Difficulty scaling is done to such an extent that even common enemies scale right along with you. In the opening scene, there is a bear you come across and at level 1 or 2, you are able to one shot it. Then the story takes you on a grand quest where ostensibly you go from a nobody to the savior of the world. However, due to difficulty scaling, if you run into the same bear halfway through the game, it will be harder to kill than when you were level 1.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#60

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

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.

My go-to example is Homeworld 2, where the dynamic difficulty scaling was IMO very poorly hidden. It was as if the player is being punished for doing the legwork to preserve and expand their fleet across missions even though the game's lore and mechanics encourage them to do so.
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