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Making difficulty curves in games

davetech.co.uk

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Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#71

Post by Ukv »

chihuahua wrote: post #24
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.…

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 wa…

> You can turn off some annoying parts of the game [...] cool that everyone can have the amount of difficulty/frustration they desire

Depends on the type of game, but I'd generally prefer those decisions be made by the game designer. If there's frustration I want it to feel like overcoming a concrete obstacle, rather than it being self-hindering that accomplishes nothing and that I could've just avoided.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#72

Post by stockworks »

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.

Yes feels like this can easily be "gamed"

For example, if I want friendlier lobbies in arc raiders, I will spawn in with no loadout and purposely surrender.. I can game my difficulty lower

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#73

Post by rcxdude »

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 think it strongly depends on how it's done and how it plays into the feeling of the game. Certain kinds of level scaling can feel pretty cheap, for example, because they kind of work against the feeling of progression you get in the game. Similarly a game obviously making things easier for you can feel like it's cheapening the satisfaction of improving at the game, though how important this is varies from person to person.

But done well, it can much more reliably create the feeling of being just on the edge of failure but pulling through, which is really satisfying in a lot of games. L4D did this, but Helldivers 2 for example also has a lot of game design focused on creating this kind of feeling.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#74

Post by rcxdude »

para_parolu wrote: post #22
ryandrake wrote: post #12

Earlier 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

I think automatic global matchmaking is a bit of a cursed problem because how people want to play a game is multidimensional beyond just their skill level at the game, it may change from session to session, and some players are incentivized to lie about it.

You can see some attempts to address this with having casual 'unranked' and competitive ranked matchmaking modes, but this still runs into whether casual means 'just fuck around and not even try to play the objective' or 'play the game as a team but not be quite so focused on winning at any cost'.

People who complain about SBMM it because they just want to pubstomp are mostly just whining and want their fun at the expense of 1-11 other players, though. (I recall a conversation on here where someone was saying that the optimum winrate for chess to keep someone engaged is about 80% and did not seem to understand that there was no way to have a group of people playing chess against each other with an average 80% winrate each)

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#75

Post by rcxdude »

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.…

I remember there were some complaints about the puzzle sections in a recent-ish God of War game where they had clearly tried to avoid this problem but by essentially having NPCs spontaneously tell you the solution to the puzzle at some point, which then just annoyed people who wanted to solve the puzzle themselves.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#76

Post by namelosw »

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 often a very bad idea. One example is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Players are punished for leveling, and many players simply give up and have to do everything on level 1.

It's essentially punishing players for playing well, and often could be gamed by playing badly intentionally.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#77

Post by rambojohnson »

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.…

seems like this is more of a personal taste issue. I rather enjoy little surprise minigames like this.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#78

Post by qwery »

orbital-decay wrote: post #67
qwery wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> My comment had nothing to do with "git gud"

Fair enough, I applied that lens to it on my own.

Allow me to elaborate on my earlier comment and reply to this one here:

A ton of it? No, I don't see that. It's probably the least commonly implemented approach to difficulty (curves).

Dynamically adjusted difficulty has been around for a long time, but it's never been broadly adopted. There's a lot of reasons for this I'm sure, but a couple of obvious ones are that executives don't tend to throw money at features they can't see [or game developers in general], and that it's a tricky thing to build anyway.

It's certainly not the default solution to the problem, but there's a long history of games implementing some form of dynamically adjusted difficulty. Some of them to great success with the difficulty system itself being celebrated (Xevious, Resident Evil 4, Left 4 Dead), the vast majority of them you have no idea even implemented such a feature, and there's also a number of famous examples that were widely derided for it (Oblivion, ...?). [I'm genuinely stumped to think of another famously bad example, not trying to make it look like there are fewer of one than the other. I'm sure there are just as many negatively viewed ones as I can come up with positive ones.]

While it's obviously possible that an individual designer/team didn't thoroughly test their particular feature, the concept itself has been very well tested in a wide variety of implementations/mechanics. And if you're playing a game designed by people who didn't test it, the difficulty scaling seems likely to be the least of your problems.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#79

Post by proc0 »

gchamonlive wrote: post #64
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…

I'm talking about the gameplay experience though. So applying Hero's Journey to the player through game design. I see what you mean though.

Re: Making difficulty curves in games

#80

Post by cccchara »

rnjesus wrote: post #13

maybe i’m in the minority of gamers overall.. i much prefer when there’s no difficulty setting (like dark souls, for example) but rather an enormous amount of tools the game gives you to solve a problem. i know there are problems with this approach, but games without a difficulty setting “feel” more like a game to me for whatever reason

an old school monster hunter gamer feels the same, and being stuck is part of the fun
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