Letting the player choose difficulty settings is fundamentally bad game design

[Chuck Norris]

On the first playthrough, if a game asks me what difficulty setting I want to choose, it's automatically a negative for me. For a couple of reasons:

1. Difficulty settings make the game predictable

Most difficulty settings boil down to easy, medium and hard. If you choose whichever one, you already have a strong idea about how the game is going to play out. In some cases, you EXACLY know how the game is going to play out, because the difficulty curve in the games of the same genre and same generation are exactly the same. Just pick any FPS from 2007-2013 era. This is how the game is going to play out depending on the difficulty you have chosen:

Easy: you have to actively try to get killed.
Medium: just don't walk into enemy bullets and you're fine
Hard: you have to shoot and then take cover

A good game makes thing easier or harder based on narrative/pacing reasons, not a metric the player chooses at the beginning.

2. The player doesn't have enough information to choose a difficulty setting

If it's your first playthrough, choosing the difficulty setting that is right for you is a pain in the ass, because you don't know how hard/easy the game is on a basic level. You just have to take a wild guess and that choice can ruin your game and make the game easier or harder than you intended.

3. Difficulty settings result in lazy balancing
On easy, the enemy dies in 1 hit. On hard, it dies on 5 hits. Wow, how creative.

This is a cop-out, because balancing in itself is an art form. By putting difficulty settings in the game, the developers make things easier for themselves, because if the game is unbalanced on hard, you chose that. If it's basically an interactive movie on easy, again, you chose that.

4. Difficulty settings don't allow players to have a shared experience
They ruin the joy of defeating a really hard boss that you might get stuck on for hours or enjoying the moments of absolute power after you have done the hard work to become strong (think Gothic games), the moments that you are eager to share with other players. With difficulty settings, moments like that are ruined and cheapened and do not become memorable enough to be worth sharing


So what are the alternatives?

1. Adding secret easy mode withing the confines of the game-play itself: like the sorcerer class in Dark Souls or certain weapons/aspects in Hades

2. Dividing the game-world into different difficulty settings, kinda like what Gothic games did. You are technically free to go wherever you want, but certain areas are hard to get through if you are still weak (this one works for open-world and semi open-world games

3. Making the main campaign easy and managable, but adding side content that is hard (kinda like GTA games or Mario games)

4. Designing the game in a way that rewards the player for showing skill, but doesn't punish the player for lack thereof (like the combo grading system in DMC and assassination grading system in Hitman games)

5. Adding dynamic difficulty (like Resident Evil 4)

Anyways, you can think of a lot of alternatives. The point is that difficulty settings suck and trivialize any challenge the game might provide. They are the result of lack of confidence and trust by the developers in their own ability to design a neat experience that deserve the player's attention and mastery.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

The issue here is that difficulty settings are code: they do not reflect for human interactions. Normal is a good way to enjoy a first run of a game. Then you learn the mechanics and the challenges that harder difficulties give.

Or you could do it right and do it like Dark Souls.

 

[Dr1f7]

heh
chuck norris has one difficulty setting
it's called

spoiler (funny punch line)

chuck norris

heh

 

[Clockwork Knight]

It's a matter of pragmatism, tweaking some values gives the game a longer lifespan and won't impact the development cycle as much as adding new systems or designing the game world around it.

 

[Tyranicon]

Bro, modern devs can barely program games, and you want them to do this integrated ludo-narratively coherent, elegant design shit?

 

[Late Bloomer]

The worst part about difficulty settings is having to read all the bragging and grandstanding about them. I am close to neutral on the subject, but if I had to choose, I would say I prefer games to have them. It has never been a make or break issue in a buying decision. But I am glad for people that have been able to enjoy games they would have otherwise bailed out on.

 

[catfood]

 

[Jvegi]

ToEE is so amazing. It doesn't need a difficulty slider. No, sir, it does not.

Very late contender for the most retarded take of the year.

 

[None]

Letting the diner choose how they want their steak done is fundamentally bad cooking.

When ordering a steak, if a waiter asks me how I want it done, it's automatically a negative for me. For a couple of reasons:

1. Doneness options make the steak predictable
Most options boil down to rare, medium rare, and medium. If you choose whichever one, you already have a strong idea about how the steak will turn out. In some cases, you EXACTLY know how the steak is going to turn out, because the standards in restaurants of the same type are exactly the same.

2. The diner doesn't have enough information to choose an option
If it's your first steak, choosing how well you want your steak cooked is a pain in the ass, because you don't know how rare/well done the steak is on a basic level. You just have to take a wild guess and that choice can ruin your steak and make the steak more or less cooked than you intended.

3. Doneness options result in lazy cooking
5-10 minutes for rare, 7-12 for medium rare. Wow, how creative.

4. Doneness options don't allow diners to have a shared experience
Too silly a point for me to mock.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

Even the most perfectly balanced game makes assumptions about who the player is, yet there is great variation in player skill. This is also true for optional content that rewards player skill, which might be impossibly difficult for some, just right for others and not enough for a few. In some games it might be a more elegant solution to reward skill by introducing "challenges", specially if the core gameplay has lots of mechanical complexity. Stuff like perfect combos and style points. Players will often create their own challenges like playing solo in a party game, not using items, etc. But let's face it, in many games there's no way to control for difficulty except by manipulating numbers (e.g. enemy stats). And I like to be challenged the entire game, not just with optional content.

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

4. Designing the game in a way that rewards the player for showing skill, but doesn't punish the player for lack thereof (like the combo grading system in DMC and assassination grading system in Hitman games)

Are you retarded? DMC absolutely punishes the shit out of you for not getting a good rank. Encounters reward you with red orbs based on your performance and so does overall level score. If you play bad you get less money to spend and have less health/moves (and items if you use those). Hitman rewards you with more item unlocks and gives you more options in future missions

5. Adding dynamic difficulty (like Resident Evil 4)

Dynamic difficulty is a shit idea. It's not okay for a game to cheat for you if you can't beat a challenge and there's no way to put it off. Re4 remake is the worst difficulty decision I've ever seen in a game. It says Normal is for players who are new but hard is for players who beat the original RE4. So WTF am I supposed to be on to get the 'intended' experience? I beat RE4 on the gamecube over a decade ago, how does that change what difficulty I need to play the remake on?

Talking about FPS games wrong as well. Normal stopped being the intended difficulty on the 360. Devs were making Hard/Heroic the intended difficulty and made normal easy for the casual market not to feel bad.

I would also argue dark souls does difficulty pretty poorly. Take the long sword in Dark souls 3, it smokes everything but it has a specific move set. If I don't like it then I make the game harder for myself without any choice. Either I use the good weapons I don't like or I use the bad weapons I do. I didn't choose what 'difficulty' I'm having fun with. It's forced on me by my play style preferences. Which is bad when you want a challenge but enjoy magic or want it hard but enjoy broken McSwordface's move set when it's not 2 shotting bosses.

 

[JarlFrank]

Difficulty settings are shit, make difficulty dependent on build instead. This works for all genres not just RPGs btw.

From Software games are a good example obviously, they have no difficulty settings but some builds are objectively easier to play than others. I'm currently playing Elden Ring and spirit ashes summons make bosses easy to get through even though I suck at the game. Offering the player various tools that you can choose to use or not is perfect difficulty balancing. Encounter too tough? Use your tools, faggot.
Arcanum lets you pick harm as your first spell, which remains the best spell in the game even into high levels. You can just spam it and kill everything. Tech characters are much harder to play as they need to scrounge for resources and get a good gun before they become powerful. Which character type you play directly affects the difficulty of the game.

There are few games that do difficulty selections right, but in those, you generally want to play on the highest difficulty for the best experience. Like Thief, where Expert difficulty adds more enemies, sometimes even expands levels to include new areas, and gives you additional goals, essentially making Expert the definitive way to play the game.

 

[Chuck Norris]

The worst part about difficulty settings is having to read all the bragging and grandstanding about them. I am close to neutral on the subject, but if I had to choose, I would say I prefer games to have them. It has never been a make or break issue in a buying decision. But I am glad for people that have been able to enjoy games they would have otherwise bailed out on.

I am not against people making the games easier for themselves, but my point is this should be done by the tools that the games provides. Not some arbitrary option you choose at the beginning of the game.

You know Kojima was on soy when he tweeted that. This is what hanging out with Hollywood celebrities does to you.

ToEE is so amazing. It doesn't need a difficulty slider. No, sir, it does not.

Very late contender for the most retarded take of the year.

ToEE is designed to be a hardcore D&D experience and only people who are looking for something like that should play it.

Why should everything be playable by everyone?

(Of course games that are hard due to being genuinely unbalanced and unfinished - like Lionheart - are another issue.)

Letting the diner choose how they want their steak done is fundamentally bad cooking.

When ordering a steak, if a waiter asks me how I want it done, it's automatically a negative for me. For a couple of reasons:

1. Doneness options make the steak predictable
Most options boil down to rare, medium rare, and medium. If you choose whichever one, you already have a strong idea about how the steak will turn out. In some cases, you EXACTLY know how the steak is going to turn out, because the standards in restaurants of the same type are exactly the same.

2. The diner doesn't have enough information to choose an option
If it's your first steak, choosing how well you want your steak cooked is a pain in the ass, because you don't know how rare/well done the steak is on a basic level. You just have to take a wild guess and that choice can ruin your steak and make the steak more or less cooked than you intended.

3. Doneness options result in lazy cooking
5-10 minutes for rare, 7-12 for medium rare. Wow, how creative.

4. Doneness options don't allow diners to have a shared experience
Too silly a point for me to mock.

This is a huge fallacy and you know it. Games and foods are not the same. Games have an intrinsic element called "challenge". If you don't believe in that, you might as well make every game like Prince of Persia 2008, in which death and losing is impossible.

Actually, that was the path the game industry was taking in late 2000s, until From Software changed the discourse. And those years are considered one of the darkest days of gaming.

Are you retarded? DMC absolutely punishes the shit out of you for not getting a good rank. Encounters reward you with red orbs based on your performance and so does overall level score. If you play bad you get less money to spend and have less health/moves (and items if you use those). Hitman rewards you with more item unlocks and gives you more options in future missions

By "punish", I meant not allowing the player to progress in the game. If you're bad at one level, you can just take the L and move on and try to make up for the lost resources by acing another level. That's a neat way of looking at difficulty in itself.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

Difficulty settings are shit, make difficulty dependent on build instead. This works for all genres not just RPGs btw.

From Software games are a good example obviously, they have no difficulty settings but some builds are objectively easier to play than others. I'm currently playing Elden Ring and spirit ashes summons make bosses easy to get through even though I suck at the game. Offering the player various tools that you can choose to use or not is perfect difficulty balancing. Encounter too tough? Use your tools, faggot.
Arcanum lets you pick harm as your first spell, which remains the best spell in the game even into high levels. You can just spam it and kill everything. Tech characters are much harder to play as they need to scrounge for resources and get a good gun before they become powerful. Which character type you play directly affects the difficulty of the game.

There are few games that do difficulty selections right, but in those, you generally want to play on the highest difficulty for the best experience. Like Thief, where Expert difficulty adds more enemies, sometimes even expands levels to include new areas, and gives you additional goals, essentially making Expert the definitive way to play the game.

Arcanum is a terrible example, though. Harm being broken isn't a substitute for an easy difficulty mode and the player has no idea that magic is superior to tech because the game world doesn't convey that idea. Most party based RPGs already include some difficulty scaling by allowing a variable number of companions and the possibility of playing solo.

I consider Thief's Expert the proper difficulty. A player who starts on an easier difficulty setting should ideally restart the game on Expert as soon as gets better at the game. There's also an implicit extra challenge for skilled players in being able to ghost the levels(it's noteworthy that some stealth games make this nearly impossible, while it feels mostly natural in Thief). I agree that's difficulty scaling done right.

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

From Software games are a good example obviously, they have no difficulty settings but some builds are objectively easier to play than others.

Which is a real big fucking problem when Elden Ring at launch had to buff every large weapon because it had 1 functional move. So the difficulty was sky high if you wanted to unga bunga.

By "punish", I meant not allowing the player to progress in the game. If you're bad at one level, you can just take the L and move on and try to make up for the lost resources by acing another level. That's a neat way of looking at difficulty in itself.

I do well in levels 1-5 I have 2 extra moves and another health increase.
I do bad in levels 1-5 I have less options and die easier.
Which of these is being punished and makes it harder to progress? If I'm bad at the game then giving me less health and less options is going to stop me progressing. If you don't buy Stinger earlier you lack movement options in fights. And if you don't buy air hike you're fucked against some of the bosses. So yea. The game directly limits how far you're going to get if you're not doing well.

 

[Falksi]

OP clearly hasn't played many genres. The joy of genres such as SHMUPs is working your way through the difficulty settings, as stuff like enemy patterns and environmental hazards often change up.

It's another debate centered around something which is great if done well, but crap if done poorly. Thinking that the problem is with what's done and not how it's done just shows gaming naivety.

 

[Butter]

The average developers, when told they can't include difficulty settings, will not suddenly start producing FromSoft games. They'll just make piss-easy walking simulators and fuck you if you wanted a challenge.

Most of your complaints come from difficulty settings done poorly (e.g. Bethesda trash).

1) This is a non sequitur. A difficulty curve is independent of the difficulty settings. E.g. Legends of Amberland 1 gets much harder when you traverse the southern desert, regardless of what difficulty you selected. Predictable (flat) difficulty is a design problem unrelated to the difficulty settings.

2) You can just tell the player. Say "This game is meant to be pretty tough. Choose Easy if it's your first time." or "The game was designed around Normal. This is where all the mechanics come together without it being too punishing, and most builds will still be viable."

3) This is a lazy developer problem. Not only should there be an intended difficulty that the game was designed around, but difficulty settings can do more than just adjust enemy damage/health. E.g. in Brigand: Oaxaca sleeping in a bed fully heals you on the lowest difficulty, but only heals you to 20 HP above that. The highest difficulty also requires you to eat in order to survive.

4) Shared experience is gay and cringe. I'd rather the players each have their own stories to tell. If you want them to all have the same experience, make a movie.

 

[Jvegi]

ToEE is designed to be a hardcore D&D experience and only people who are looking for something like that should play it.

Toee is a piss easy broken mess, that needs a human gm to adjust the difficulty on the spot to make the game fun.

You can't do that, but you could have a dificulty slider.

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

2) You can just tell the player. Say "This game is meant to be pretty tough. Choose Easy if it's your first time." or "The game was designed around Normal. This is where all the mechanics come together without it being too punishing, and most builds will still be viable."

I would like for them to show difficulty changes along with the text. Let me know if Hard just adds 25% health or adds new enemies. I fucking hate this "For experienced players!" bullshit. I'm very experienced but I don't want bullet sponges adding 3 hours to your 10 hour game

 

[octavius]

If a game is too easy, and I can't adjust it, why would I play it in the first place?

 

[Lemming42]

They're fine if they're used exactly like this:

NORMAL = intended way to play the game, complete experience, well-tested.

EASY = optional mode to be used exclusively by people who try normal first, and find it too hard. Players choose it with the understanding that they're not playing the intended game, but rather an optional, less-playtested mode.

HARD = bonus mode for people who already beat the game and want to play it again with more challenge. Players choose it with the understanding that they're not playing the intended game, but rather an optional, less-playtested mode.

Anything else is annoying. Shit like Doom with its massive array of vaguely-defined difficulty options (which are all too easy, including UV) can fuck off.

 

[Chuck Norris]

If a game is too easy, and I can't adjust it, why would I play it in the first place?

For relaxation.

I switch between hard games and easy games depending on mood. And I appreciate the fact that they are meant to be like that.

For example, when I was a bit burnt out, I played Spyro. The game is very easy (even 100% ing it is relatively easy) and I liked the fact the game doesn't have difficulty settings, because if it did, I would be tempted to choose "hard" and ruin the relaxing aspect of it for myself. Sometimes, it's good to defend players from their own bad habits and just provide a definitive experience that is meant to have a certain effect, without deviating from it.

Spyro is an easy platformer. Crash Bandicoot is a relatively harder platformer. And the fact that they're distinct from each other in that regard is their strength.

1) This is a non sequitur. A difficulty curve is independent of the difficulty settings. E.g. Legends of Amberland 1 gets much harder when you traverse the southern desert, regardless of what difficulty you selected. Predictable (flat) difficulty is a design problem unrelated to the difficulty settings.

This point was valid. I didn't realize my own fallacy. Difficulty curve is not related to difficulty setting.

However, I still find games in which I'm not supposed to choose a difficulty setting in the beginning far more exciting, because I can just take every challenge or easiness as it comes, rather than thinking back to the difficulty setting and thinking I made the wrong choice there.

 

[KD6-3.7]

And then all difficulty settings get dumbed to easy.

The easy players want one-click glory but not the easy label so they play on normal or hard and then bitch that it isn't easy enough.

 

[Tyranicon]

I prefer this tbh:

Intended difficulty = hard as balls, will filter most people, what the game is balanced around.

Easy = player can remove difficulty elements as they desire, let the player customize their settings to create a less frustrating and easier experience.

Very easy = go watch it on YouTube.

 

[processdaemon]

It really depends on the type of game you're making and who you're trying to appeal to.

In, say, a FromSoftware game a boss' moveset and difficulty can be a part of their characteristion. To use a recent example, when you fight Rennala in her first phase/ current state she's pathetic and doesn't really even defend herself beyond her little bubble. In the much more powerful illusion of her past self that Ranni conjures to defend her the contrast between what she was and what she is now highlights the effect of Radahn's betrayal. If the game had a storymode and you just instantly splattered her in phase 2 that would be a disservice not only to the gameplay but to the the story.

Games that give you most of their story through text and cutscenes don't lose as much from having difficulty sliders, and by having highly customisable difficulty they can serve a broader church fanbasewise (which can be the only way to keep a mid size studio afloat). A good example of this is Owlcat games; on one hand you've got buildfags who need difficulties that can challenge even their most finely tuned creations and on the other you've got storyfags who basically want to play a VN with some running around, and with the right settings adjustments you can keep both (relatively) happy. It's also nice to be catered to a bit when multiple methods of difficulty scaling are employed at once as it's possible to like enemies hitting harder and having different movesets but hate HP bloat.