Difficulty levels -- where hast thou gone?

[Zanzoken]

Are proper difficulty levels something of a lost art nowadays in cRPGs and gaming in general?

It seems like one of the more common complaints about games is difficulty. Complaints of games being too streamlined and neutered are common on the Codex, but there are games that have taken it too far in the other direction. Darkest Dungeon being the most recent example, where the devs jacked up the difficulty to a point that even a lot of Codexers are saying it's not fun anymore.

Of course, from a business standpoint we all understand why devs typically choose to make their games quite easy -- unless your game is able to hit that "losing is fun" sweet spot a la Dark Souls, designing the game to be too hard for average retards casual players and game reviewers is perilous. They will get butthurt and use the outlets available to them -- i.e. Steam reviews and popular gaming websites -- to shit on your game, which has a material impact on sales and your bottom line.

But it seems like the whole point of difficulty levels is to circumvent this. If you're getting frustrated, turn the difficulty down -- if you're getting bored, turn it up. And everyone is happy.

Yet I feel like a lot of devs are hesitant to even include difficulty levels, instead going for a one-size-fits-all balance geared toward some idea of a "median gamer" -- who in most cases has apparently never played a game in his life. And this is much to the chagrin of cRPG veterans, who will actually take time to read manuals, learn systems, and get good at the game.

So what's going on here? I feel like it shouldn't be this difficult to implement effective difficulty levels, so gamers like us can get a proper challenge and the casuals can get their Awesome button. But I guess it's easier said than done, so I'm eager to hear everyone's thoughts.

 

[Excidium II]

Implementing proper dificulty levels is quite hard. Changing encounters and enemy behavior, availability of items, level layouts...All that effort could just have gone making the actual game better.

Stupid shit like multiplying damage done/taken we can do without.

And if the core difficulty is balanced for retards then raising difficulty only makes it dumber in different ways, generally forcing you to cheese to win encounters.

 

[Zanzoken]

That makes sense, but why not just balance around Hard and then skew the numbers on lower difficulties so it's easy to win?

It's not like casuals give a shit about things like encounter design and AI anyway.

 

[Excidium II]

That makes sense, but why not just balance around Hard and then skew the numbers on lower difficulties so it's easy to win?

It's not like casuals give a shit about things like encounter design and AI anyway.

Because they don't want challenge but at the same time playing on easy modes makes them feel bad about themselves. People need that illusion that they're good at videogames.

 

[Trashos]

I agree with Zanzoken.

Implementing proper dificulty levels is quite hard. Changing encounters and enemy behavior, availability of items, level layouts...All that effort could just have gone making the actual game better.

Stupid shit like multiplying damage done/taken we can do without.

And if the core difficulty is balanced for retards then raising difficulty only makes it dumber in different ways, generally forcing you to cheese to win encounters.

Yes, it is hard, but this issue is crucial for the quality of a game and I believe it should be prioritized. Hard, yet definitely not impossible, as games like BG2 or Civ4 have shown.

Multiplying damage and stuff like that IS the solution, if we want to be realistic. Encounter design is a (more elegant but) harder to implement solution. Adjusting the AI for different difficulties is a very hard solution.

Excidium, listen, what are really our options here? To cut a long story short, either the game is going to be extremely easy so that it can be commercially successful or it will be hard and the developer will go belly up. There are brilliant exceptions to this rule, but they are exceptions. I am not sure it is wise to depend on exceptions.

 

[Excidium II]

Do it right or don't do it.

 

[octavius]

I never bother with using anything but default difficulty levels in CRPGs, 'cause in CRPGs higher difficulty=HP bloat.

Shooters (and related games like Thief) and especially turn based strategy games is another matter, though.
The Thief, Civilization, Age of Wonders and HoMM games are definitely more fun on max difficulty, but I can't recall a single CRPG where upping the difficulty led to a more fun game.

For CRPGs I usually make my own restrictions to increase the difficulty, like no minmaxing (unless the game really is very hard or tedious witout max stats), no save scumming for max HP or better loot, no resting after and before spamming Fireballs in every combat, and generally playing most CRPGs in Iron Man Light style (only reload if party death, if pathfinding or AI bugs out, or if accidentally pressing wrong key at critical moments).

Can anyone name some CRPGs where having difficulty settings led to a more fun game?

 

[Excidium II]

Thief

There's a game that does it right

 

[CryptRat]

I play most games on default difficulty (and I don't min/max). I have no idea if I'm right to do that or if I should more often consider harder difficulty levels since I rarely tried otherwise, but then I just want the game to be fun on default difficulty (which generally means not too easy, not every single game has to be brutal, it's cool that some are though, in particular when the combat system is good).

 

[undecaf]

I liked the idea of slower character competency growth in the first two Fallouts (can't remember if the diff. settings did anything else worth mentioning). It wasn't perfect there, but I think it's a workable base ground to build a system that is as fair as what kind of PC you've built and not needing to resort to HP/damage modifiers.

 

[Excidium II]

slower character competency growth

Awful

 

[Celerity]

Are proper difficulty levels something of a lost art nowadays in cRPGs and gaming in general?

It seems like one of the more common complaints about games is difficulty. Complaints of games being too streamlined and neutered are common on the Codex, but there are games that have taken it too far in the other direction. Darkest Dungeon being the most recent example, where the devs jacked up the difficulty to a point that even a lot of Codexers are saying it's not fun anymore.

Now you're right that difficulty levels aren't done properly anymore, with most games either:

1: Having none whatsoever.
2: Having some, but designed as lazy health/damage sliders.
3: Having some, but the highest difficulty is "might require your eyes on the screen" and not in any way actually hard.
4: Having some, but the higher difficulties are just tedious and not difficult (this is actually the most common...)
5: Having some, but both the low and high difficulties are caliberated wrong.
6: Some combination of these.

Derpest Dungeon somehow manages ALL of those, even the contradictory ones. All you do is stack damage and spam Hellions and win, it's just tedious and grindy as fuck now. It also has no difficulty settings, but they claim it does.

As for games that aren't complete shit and are well, games...

There are very few games that get difficulty selects right. Hell, there's very few that can get one right.

For that reason I can't think of any games that have been improved by the inclusion of a difficulty select. I can think of a few that'd be better off without it, even games like Lords of Xulima where difficulty affects most aspects of the ruleset. It's distinct, well thought out rulesets (except enemy skills), but it mostly just results in casual tards getting farmed by Cursed Hounds on Casual then blaming the game for it.

 

[undecaf]

Awful

Can well be, yes.

 

[Trashos]

Can anyone name some CRPGs where having difficulty settings led to a more fun game?

When a game offers me strategies (e.g. crafting) that I don't need to beat it, that's a good sign that I need to increase the difficulty.

Baldur's Gate was my first DnD series, and I beat it on normal without understanding DnD rules at all ("What is this Thac0 shit? Oh, well, maybe I 'll just ignore it then") or even tanking properly. I didn't use consumables much either. When I turned BG2 up to hard, I had to really study the system to understand my options in order to survive. That was GREAT fun, because the system was deep and very well executed.

I know that a lot of codexians hate BG2, and I guess the example may be different for each gamer. The bottom line is: if there is more to the system than what you are using, turn up the difficulty!

 

[octavius]

I use SCS to increase the difficulty in the BG games.
SCS does what increased difficulty in games ideally should do: make the AI smarter.

Also, with the original BG1 I actually made a habit of activating whole monster groups before killing them instead of abusing the very poor unpatched AI to lure away one enemy at a time.

 

[Zanzoken]

That makes sense, but why not just balance around Hard and then skew the numbers on lower difficulties so it's easy to win?

It's not like casuals give a shit about things like encounter design and AI anyway.

Because they don't want challenge but at the same time playing on easy modes makes them feel bad about themselves. People need that illusion that they're good at videogames.

I agree but I think they'll generally play on Normal and be satisfied, and then it's as simple as using a little trickery.

For games that still use difficulty levels like D:OS, I think the devs make the mistake of making Normal the actual game with an appropriate level of challenge. Sure there is Easy, but like you point out most people don't want to play it because they feel stupid.

The trick is to make Hard the actual proper difficulty, and tune Normal down to where Easy would've been. The casuals think they are playing Normal = "I am pretty good at this game" but in reality it's still easy, you've just labeled it to be inclooooosive enough to protect their delicate feelings.

Make Easy so goddamn simple that a child could beat it, then your Impossible or whatever difficulty can be ass-kicking mode, for the people who don't care if the game is fair and just like to be punished.

But the key is that you still balance the game around Hard for encounters, AI, etc. Then just game the numbers to achieve the other difficulties.

 

[Roguey]

I'm not sure what you're talking about, most recent RPGs do have difficulty settings. Additionally, those that do more than just slide some numbers around were always an exception, not a norm.

Furthermore, a lot of people who are responsible for designing combat content for RPGs are bad at playing them. God can't create a rock he himself can't lift.

 

[Celerity]

That's the exact reason why Xulima difficulties are called Normal/Veteran/Hardcore instead of the Casual/Real/Hardcore they started as.

 

[CryptRat]

Dungeon Of The Endless has cool difficulty level denominations :

 

[Zanzoken]

I use SCS to increase the difficulty in the BG games.
SCS does what increased difficulty in games ideally should do: make the AI smarter.

Also, with the original BG1 I actually made a habit of activating whole monster groups before killing them instead of abusing the very poor unpatched AI to lure away one enemy at a time.

I think the problem with "make the AI smarter" is that it means you're designing multiple AI systems -- the real one and the dipshit one. Which as was pointed out above, is a resource sink that will inevitably take away from other areas of the game.

Casuals aren't discerning enough to tell good AI from bad, so I think the solution is to design good AI -- and encounters, levels, etc -- and then on the lower difficulties, use invisible cheating to skew things in the player's favor. If enemies do 1 damage and you have 999 HP, then it really doesn't matter how good the AI is.

 

[Celerity]

I use SCS to increase the difficulty in the BG games.
SCS does what increased difficulty in games ideally should do: make the AI smarter.

Also, with the original BG1 I actually made a habit of activating whole monster groups before killing them instead of abusing the very poor unpatched AI to lure away one enemy at a time.

I think the problem with "make the AI smarter" is that it means you're designing multiple AI systems -- the real one and the dipshit one. Which as was pointed out above, is a resource sink that will inevitably take away from other areas of the game.

Casuals aren't discerning enough to tell good AI from bad, so I think the solution is to design good AI -- and encounters, levels, etc -- and then on the lower difficulties, use invisible cheating to skew things in the player's favor. If enemies do 1 damage and you have 999 HP, then it really doesn't matter how good the AI is.

This is the XCOM model, where anything lower than the second or third difficulty has crippled AI (among other things). It's mostly been harmful. How often do you see XCOM difficulty used as a meme? How many of those were on Normal? (answer: most of them).

 

[Zanzoken]

Harmful because it was a bad idea, or harmful because it wasn't properly implemented?

X-Com and XCOM are also at least somewhat part of the Dark Souls anomaly, where people expect them to be harder than most other games.

 

[Celerity]

Harmful because what happens is they go around like I love hard games like XCOM... but since they had crippled enemy AI and the game quietly cheating for them they really didn't enjoy any difficulty because there was none. And then they find something that's actually hard and then they rage. Dark Souls kind of does this as well. It doesn't have a difficulty select muddying terminology, so people do know what you're talking about and what it means when you say you beat X in Dark Souls. The problem here is that the entire Souls series is only remarkable in that it is modern. Pay attention, infrequent save points... I just described the Souls series, as well as every single game made in the 20th century. When you redefine difficulty as not being a mouth breathing fuckwit, actual difficulty cannot exist.

And I say this as someone who enjoys XCOM and Souls games.

 

[Eyestabber]

Are proper difficulty levels something of a lost art nowadays in cRPGs and gaming in general?

It seems like one of the more common complaints about games is difficulty. Complaints of games being too streamlined and neutered are common on the Codex, but there are games that have taken it too far in the other direction. Darkest Dungeon being the most recent example, where the devs jacked up the difficulty to a point that even a lot of Codexers are saying it's not fun anymore.

Of course, from a business standpoint we all understand why devs typically choose to make their games quite easy -- unless your game is able to hit that "losing is fun" sweet spot a la Dark Souls, designing the game to be too hard for average retards casual players and game reviewers is perilous. They will get butthurt and use the outlets available to them -- i.e. Steam reviews and popular gaming websites -- to shit on your game, which has a material impact on sales and your bottom line.

But it seems like the whole point of difficulty levels is to circumvent this. If you're getting frustrated, turn the difficulty down -- if you're getting bored, turn it up. And everyone is happy.

Yet I feel like a lot of devs are hesitant to even include difficulty levels, instead going for a one-size-fits-all balance geared toward some idea of a "median gamer" -- who in most cases has apparently never played a game in his life. And this is much to the chagrin of cRPG veterans, who will actually take time to read manuals, learn systems, and get good at the game.

So what's going on here? I feel like it shouldn't be this difficult to implement effective difficulty levels, so gamers like us can get a proper challenge and the casuals can get their Awesome button. But I guess it's easier said than done, so I'm eager to hear everyone's thoughts.

So basically, you want a game that is challenging/hard without resorting to HP bloat/damage cheat?

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- Wow, you have such a trustworthy face. Lead the way, kind sir!

 

[Jimmious]

The problem generally lies in the fact that gaming companies stopped evolving AI about 20 years ago or something. They just probably decided that better AI would make players not want to play their game because its too hard.

Seriously it's about time we get a shift of focus in that direction. It's 2016 ffs, the Japanese probably have mechs with AI already