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On Auto-Dynamic Difficulty In Videogames
Thanks to Game Matters for its discussion of the problems with difficulty levels in videogames, as the weblog, authored by 3D Realms' Scott Miller, talks about why "games should only rarely allow players to set their own difficulty level." Miller argues: "One of the most common ways games sabotage their potential to appeal to larger numbers of players is by being too difficult... Practically everyone designing games nowadays is a hardcore player with elite skills. It's therefore easy for game designers to misjudge the difficulty of their own games." He describes 'auto-dynamic difficulty', related to Max Payne, as "...a few variables that rate the player's ability, and the player's rating (completely internal to the game) determines the damage that both the player's weapon delivers, and the enemies' weapons deliver against the player." Miller ends by pointing out: "If a player completes your game, they are much more likely to buzz about, spreading the word that it was a great game."
Aaaaarrrrrgh! I lost me leg in a Nightmare game of Quake!
I've found very few games which are to difficult to beat on the lowest difficulty setting. A good example of why a user should set it is JK II: Jedi Outcast. I played it on easy the first time for the challenge of the puzzles, and then upped the difficulty the second time to challenge my skills. I get to play the game twice, but for different purposes. More bang for my buck. Not only that, but you souldn't make a game more beatable to get buzz. The point of a game is the challenge. It's not to make it easier and easier until the person can get through the levels. As long as game makers make sure that their "easy" setting is truly easy, you should have no problem. Let the user decide how difficult it should be. Some people want to get through a game without dying, others want to have to restart a level 100 times to truly feal that they earned the next level (masacists are weird....)
Oh, Max Payne has auto-dynamic difficulty?
...Half-Life's end comes to mind. I hated it and actually went through the final encounter with cheats on for the first time. I tried it some 10-20 times without them thou.
Infact, I was suspecting it. I'm in the process of playing Max Payne 2 through, and indeed it seems that on a third to fifth try of one particularly nasty spot I suddenly miraculously got through it even thou I felt I got a lot of hits.
Which is good. I hate games where I have to endlessly reload to get past some point.
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Unreal Tournament supports this, increasing or decreasing the skill of its bots depending on how well you are playing. It's a good way of measuring your own skill, rather than just putting it on the highest setting and getting frustrated.
UT does, however, change difficulty a bit too quickly. It's easy to get a few frags in front on Novice and suddenly find yourself on Godlike.
...is to make those parts of the game that you have to solve fairly easy, while still adding lots of extras with varying difficulty (just don't fall into the trap of rewarding the good players with items that makes it even easier for them...instead focus on fun but useless rewards)
Personally I think it is bad that the player has the option to solve everything , so a few impossible or near impossible spots should be added as well, just to teach the player that they aren't supposed to go exploring every cranny of the map, but instead focus on their mission.
Then again, some hardcore players will never give up until every single resistance is dealt with, however little they have to do with the mission...
This is just preparation for a press release later this week about how Duke Nukem Forever will be delayed a bit more because it has become clear that an auto-dynamic-difficulty systems is essential for a game of that type.
:-)
On ADD itself:
I think this stuff might work a bit for some games, but generally it would suck. How much sense of accomplishment would you get from completing a game that you knew just tuned itself down to your level? Of course the general public won't know about this so they'll think they are becoming elite gamers because they finish every game in record time and as such the marketing aspect of ADD might just work.
What might be next? ADD-d muliplayer FPS's where the damage you do per shot is inversely proportional to your frag-count?
I'd love to see an ADD implementation of pac-man though, the challenge would be to play so badly that the ghosts run away from you when you approach
Of course, the one thing that does make Max Payne different is the fact that once you have completed the game, you unlock a harder mode of difficulty - so although many people can be happy that they've completed the game and so spread the word, not as many people can say they've completed the game in New York Minute mode. It means that everyone can 'complete' the game, but only the best can fully complete it.
has a "dynamic" mode which seems to change between the easy, medium and hard difficulty levels.
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Mario 1 was a hard game to beat on the system, but once you did it you felt like the king of the world and had to get all your friends to play it so you could brag that you beat it and they couldent:P
By changing the inherent rules in the system halfway through the game? please.
the last thing a gamer wants to see is a shot that used to kill a bad guy suddenly not killing bad guys anymore. give the bad guys bigger guns, grenades, cover, backup -- something like that. don't ruin the verisimilitude because you have no imagination.
scaling difficulty is fine - but assess it between 'missions' and adjust those for skill for chrissakes and don't change the physics of the game and try to masquerade that as 'difficulty'.
and imo, when a game scales difficulty it should be akin to GoldenEye for the 64. On easy maybe just making it from point A to point B is enough to complete an area. But on 'hard' there should be more stringent requirements (no alarms, rescue a prisoner, steal some data, assassinate a general, destroy a depot, etc, etc).
having to alter the physics should be the first clue that your AI and design aren't capable of being challenging in the first place.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
It's wasy to take this too far, Mario Kart comes to mind, both multiplayer and single, using somewhat cheesy tactics (weapons and arbitrary speed increases) to keep the field much closer to even than would otherwise be the case.
One problem with systems like that is when players try to scam the system, like purposefully just hanging back in second or beyond to get good weapons but never getting so far back that they can't catch up. Admittedly, that takes a certain amount of skill on its own, but still.
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make the games easier so our industry can rack up the dough ??
sorry, guess Im feeling cynical this morning.
but it does seem like most gamers I know finish games
very quickly and then move on to something else.
Seems like if they were more thought provoking
instead of run around crazy shooting everything
people would find them more enjoyable and
recommend them
I've played racing games where if I'm dominating the track, the 2nd place driver all of a sudden can go 50 mph faster than me and turn on a dime in order to catch up. I've also seen the effect where if I make a mistake and wreck, the competition slows to a crawl to allow me to catch up. I can understand this in games such as Mario Kart or other arcade racing games but I don't want this in my Gran Turismo or other "real" racing games.
Also, in some of the RPGs I've played, the monsters get stronger as I get stronger. That's ridiculous. I understand meeting new monsters that are stronger but when the little slime you had a hard time with at level 1 is still giving you a hard time at level 20, that's just plain ridiculous. Even worse is that you still get the same xp and gp.
There may be some really good reasons out there to have auto-adjusting difficulty, but for me personally, I don't believe it's that great a feature.
Project Gotham Racing 2 has the best difficulty curve I've seen. Basic/bronze medals are very easy to get, and give you a good feel for the course. Silver medals are the sweet spot, you won't have trouble if you are good, but it's not a cakewalk. Gold medals will take some retries, and platinum medals are punishment :)
Not to mention that you get to see your Kudos rank on Xbox Live after each course. It was a motivating factor to keep playing because I kept getting higher and higher on the lists.
I'm on top of my game like I'm standin' on Xbox.
I remember playing Red Alert on easy first, then again on hard. It was more fun for me - I got double the challenge. Did the same with Half-Life. I liked being able to do that.
I can understand what Scott is saying, and I think that a properly implemented ADD will give you this too. A bad ADD will mean that a poor player who got lucky ends up in a situation they can't win, and gets frustrated and gives up.
I had another idea though: instead of just changing some variables (hit points or whatever), what about changing the gameplay? For example, you could change puzzles or add new ones. Eg: remove a box, so the player can't just jump up somewhere - they have to be more creative. You could also add access (eg: remove walls etc) to areas which are hidden to beginners - let them focus on the mission, and send the experts a different (more difficult) way round. How about making better players go off to find a key/card to open a door, but letting the other players through without needing it. Are there any games that already change the maps according to player skill?
The key to really making it work is finding the balance of what to do for which skill level; being able to accurately judge a player's skill is an important part of this. It's a lot of work, and sometimes it's easier to let the player choose their skill level.
One other thing occurs to me. Remember Doom's nightmare mode? I don't think you could ever reasonably have something like that with an ADD system, but there are some (strange) people who find it fun.
-- Steve
Sounds like a lot of work for nothing to me. Just give the user enough difficulty levels so that they can set it to what they need. I've played a few games where even Easy mode was too hard, and Impossible mode was anything but.
"If a player completes your game, they are much more likely to buzz about, spreading the word that it was a great game."
Unless it has a real shitty, anticlimactic ending like XIII.
It had a really nice system. You could change the difficulty setting while in the game. It changed the amount of damage done by monsters, but low settings reduced the amount of experience you gained.
This was really nice for those annoying times you got stuck in a place. For example in my first game I made the alarm ring in the room near the dryads. Then I got damaged by the traps in the room, and overwrote my old game. Then came the golems, which quickly killed me.
In other games this would have meant downloading a cheat, restarting the game, or perhaps loading a saved game from an hour ago. In BG2 I could just temporarily set the difficulty level to easy, kill them, and set it back to normal.
For me in most games it doesn't happen that it's too hard in general. It's usually too hard in a specific place, because I screwed up, went to the wrong place, or especially in RPGs, had a party that couldn't deal with the enemy. It can be bad luck too, like in Morrowind, where you can be really screwed if you *have* to sleep, do it, and have a zombie wake you up and attack before you're healed.
"If a player completes your game, they are much more likely to buzz about, spreading the word that it was a great game."
Or in the case of Max Payne 2 that you can beat it in less than five hours.
"I'm not high, just stupid" --JY
This doesn't naturally make it any easier to complete a game. Indeed, it makes it a lot of harder. But it makes extracting FUN easier, since you don't have to play the same 25 levels just to discover something new (or replay the same level 99,5 times).
Software should be free as in speech, but if we also get some free beer, all the better.
I really don't see any advantage with that method. If you can dynamically adjust the difficulty in a game, you can manually adjust the difficulty too. (For some games you can't adjust the difficulty without changing the game - e.g. puzzle games).
Let the users select different difficulty levels. If they want/need it easy let them have it easy.
If someone with high skill wants to run around splattering enemies just for relaxation why dynamically increase the difficulty level so that they can't? Doh.
If your target audience don't know that the mouse should be taken out of its plastic bag, give them a God mode difficulty level.
"If a player completes your game, they are much more likely to buzz about, spreading the word that it was a great game."
If I finish a game and it felt too short (and often, a game can feel too short directly by being too easy) then my "buzz" will be "rent it. it's too short"
A great example I find of scaled difficulty is in the game "Star Monkey" by Small Rockets (formerly Fiendish Games -- or is it the other way around?)
In that game your ship can load up on skills, power, extra weapons. The quantity of enemies you face is directly determined by your level of firepower. So, when you're equipped to the gills, the game isn't too easy, and if you die and lose all those weapons, you're never caught in an impossible situation either. It's brilliant.
Check it out here:
http://www.smallrockets.com/index_main.htm
My two bits is that it seems like this design concept is way long in the tooth by now. I have two ten-year-olds who don't play games until they've done their homework and practiced Piano and orchestra -- meaning we don't get too much electronic time. But dang it if they can't immediately recognize "bosses" when they make their entrance. It's trite, it doesn't really add to the fun as much as it does the player's frustration, and usually those sequences are where the "difficulty" settings we're talking about get frustrating.
I say game designers lack imagination. It's not that they're better at chording buttons, (though they vastly overestimate how fun we think that is). They need to think about pacing in more imaginative ways than "this level has a boss at the end."
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Unreal Tournemant implemented the option that bots would adjust to the skill level the player was playing at.
Also, they introduced the idea that the final boss of the single player "campaign" would be barely beatable by the player. Essentially if you look at the code for the final level you will find a note saying that the final boss is designed to "stay one step ahead of the player", which goes hand-in-hand with the strategy i've heard which is to stay sucky for a while and then ramp up your apparent skill level quickly at the end to over take the AI's learning curve.
I also agree with being able to set your difficulty. I like to play UT and be able to a) completely thrash the bots b) be moderately challenged or c) try to take on a higher difficulty than I'm used to in order to try and get better. Having that flexibility is nice.
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Dynamic scaling is not the way to go. I am guessing that the majority of gamers play games because they feel they have overcome a challenge. I think this applies to the non hardcore gamer too. Do you really think people would enjoy Dance Dance Revolution if it slowed down to match a players ability and let them hit the wrong pad?? With online play becoming more and more common, I think the dynamic scaling could set you up for a big letdown. Here you go finish the game and think you did really well and then you get online and can't score a frag.
"...a few variables that rate the player's ability, and the player's rating (completely internal to the game) determines the damage that both the player's weapon delivers, and the enemies' weapons deliver against the player."
What a stupid way to set the difficulty in a game!
I don't know about ya'll, but there's nothing I hate more than shooters which ramp up the difficulty by making you shoot everybody 5-6 times before they drop dead.
I mean please, talk about the lazy way out.
Give me smarter enemies, or more enemies or heck even just less ammo and fewer health packs.
But please don't kill all sense of realism and fun by forcing me to cap every enemy in the chest ten times before the stop shooting back!
How about taking some of that genius computer code that automagically determines how good your playing and using it to develope enemy AI that doesn't just hang around picking it's nose until you get w/in ten feet of it, or constantly try to shoot through walls!
It's important for developers to remember that challenge does not equal fun. I personally think that difficulty levels should default to the easiest level possible and gamers looking for a challenge could manually set them higher.
That's not to say that ADD couldn't be implemented properly. One of the best examples of this I have seen is in "Sly Cooper and the Thievius Racconus" for PS2. If a player died multiple times on a given level, they would be given a lucky horseshoe that would allow them an extra hit before dying. It made the game much more enjoyable for my casual gaming friends.
On the flip side, "Mario Kart 64" (N64) had the worst ADD as enemies would always be a few mistakes behind you. It didn't matter if you performed average or godlike, a few slip ups and you would be overtaken. I referred to this as "cheating opponents" and will not even think about buying MK:Double Dash until I know that this "feature" isn't in the game.
If Auto-Dynamic Difficulty can prevent frustration, then it is good. If it causes frustration, then it should be left out.
Skill level adjustment is not a linear argument. It depends on the type of game. While auto-adjustment may make sense for an arcade-style game like Max Payne (where you do the same thing throughout the whole game) but it is unwelcome for simulators (racing, sports).
What I really appreciate (thanks, KoTOR) are games that let you change the difficulty level at any time. I also appreciate games that offer you hints (Popcap's Bejeweled, Sierra's Phantasmagoria) to keep the pace from lulling.
Indeed, the purpose of games is entertainment! Some people are willing to spend 8 hours every consecutive day until a game is finished, while others would prefer to spend 3 hours a week. Neither party should be penalized. I'm sure these demographics are related to the article I read about the average age of gamers rising ever closer to 25.
Rez did this to a certain extent.
Essentially, the difficulty of the boss at the end of the level was determined by how well you;d done leading up to it. It was kind of like a reward for doing well, and added some replayability, because the enhancements the boss would get going from normal to hard were somewhat obvious. Once I knew this was happening, I got a charge from knowing that I had earned the 'super' boss.
It also meant that if you weren't that good yet, you'd stand a better chance of getting to see the next level anyway, plus have some incentive to try again.
This is the only game I know of off hand that does this, but I'm sure there are others.
Yeah, I have a webcomic...
Challenging games are fun, but sometimes they are downright stupid. After having enjoyed a couple Alone in the Dark and Silent Hill games, I decided to try Resident Evil. All I have to say is the first thing I did was to enable the cheat for double saves. As an adult, I simply don't have the time or patience to go through artificially great swaths of a game over and over just to feel like I won't run short, especially given the poor weapon control in that game! I just don't remember any of the other games being so troublesome.
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Sometimes I don't want to worry about my game being too hard or easy. I don't want to get stuck or a hard part or get bored if I get too good. You know, sometimes. But I think having it as an option is best.
The absolute worst attempt at scaling difficulty I've ever seen is Homeworld 2. Really all it does is takes the force you have coming into that mission, and creates an initial enemy force that will beat it (not only in numbers, but also in ship types -- if you have fighters, they have lots of anti-fighter ships). So the easiest way to play the game involves wrecking all your ships at the end of each mission, and (by far) the hardest way is to maintain a strong fleet. GAH.
Of course, no other attempts I've seen are even close to that. I think scaling AI is a good way to do it, when it should be done at all.
One thing missing from today games, is the suspense of losing.
I remember getting so far into certain games and being nervous about dying, because if I did I had to start over.
Now sometimes it was exteremely frustrating and ruined the game. Other times it made winning that much more fun. nethack comes to mind.
But now with a quick save every minute there is no suspense.
Because of the quick saves though the game makers make the games harder.
Somehow a balance of the two is needed, but I am afraid there will never be an ideal choice for everyone.
You can turn on the same feature in UT2K3, too, just not when you're running a multiplayer game. In Instant Action mode, it's in the Game Rules tab, which seems like a bizarre place to put it (i.e. away from the rest of the bot settings). I know in 2K3, at least, there's a limit on how many levels the computer is allowed to promote the AI--someone who initially chose Experienced bots won't get Godlike ones just because they're kicking too much butt.
There was a game for the NES, a shooter called Zanac. Back then I was a shooter fanatic, this was before the auto-firing Advantage joystick, but I had built up my ability to hit the fire buttons around 13 times per second for hours on end. I could dodge anything. I could play 1942 almost completely through with one guy.
So back to Zanac. I pop the game in, start playing. It's not too bad. The number of enemies is OK, some are in patterns, some using player homing. No problem. A quarter of way through the first level, I'm thinking "Geez, lots of guys for the first level". Half way through, I'm starting to sweat. Three quarters of the way through, the screen is so full of enemy bullets that I cannot move. I die three times, and then things start to clear out.
WTF? So, I read the manual. On the last page, in horribly translated English, is a blurb telling me that Zanac has "fastastic super cool AI new system" that adjusts the difficulty based on how long you live, the percent of total enemies killed, how rapidly you fire, etc.
But they had no caps, so the game became unplayable if you were a fanatic. So, I turned to the exploit route, just to test the system.
I would only kill about two thirds of the enemies, barely shot the guns, died every so often. Beat the game in 45 minutes.
The biggest problem with dynamic difficulty levels, as I see it, is differentiating between players having trouble playing your game, and doing behavior that they have determined will give them an easier time. They're no longer playing the game, they're playing your dynamic difficulty equations. Lame.
My two cents.
Good games usually have just the one difficulty setting, although that depends heavily on the genre.
Auto scaling difficulty is lame. I don't want a fake sense of accomplishment. I want to play games like Ikaruga, and Viewtiful Joe, where on the harder difficulty levels the game will stomp your nuts if you make a single mistake when you're playing it.
Why do I like this? Because when you do figure out a level, when you do get in the zone, and play through the level perfectly, you get an amazing feeling of accomplishment. This rush is what gaming is about.
If all I want is to be told a good story and not have any chance of dying due to bad playing, I'll watch a freaking DVD.
Two games built using the same game engine: "Jak II" and "Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando".
"Jak II" is just way, way too hard. Worse, it's hard in irritating and boring ways, like being prevented from completing a mission by a random traffic jam, or the "Escape from the boardwalks" mission where the game will literally throw an endless supply of guards at you until you force your way through or die of boredom. (That was the point at which I resorted to the cheat codes.) I should point out that I'm no klutz when it comes to games--I'm a pretty good Wipeout player, and I finished Jak & Daxter without needing to cheat. Jak II is just ludicrously tough.
Now contrast with "Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando", which is the game Jak II should have been. The elegance of the R&C game design is that it's automatically self-adjusting without changing the rules--it starts off easy, and if the difficulty ramps up too quickly for you, you can just keep trying for a while. Eventually by killing the stuff you *can* kill, you get enough bolts to buy bigger and better weapons and armor which will let you plough through the nastier enemies. The only potentially frustrating parts are the environment-related traps and puzzles, like the pit of lava at the bottom of a river of lava that took me half a dozen attempts to get across.
The end result is that Jak II was nowhere near as much fun as R&C:GC has been. In fact, even with cheat codes I gave up on Jak II, because the final level seems to dispense with actually allowing you save/continue points, so one small slip and you have to start the entire thing again. Really, I don't know what Naughty Dog were thinking...
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"If a player completes your game, they are much more likely to buzz about, spreading the word that it was a great game."
Why is he worrying about the players completing his game? He and a team of programmers can't finish it, either!
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I just finished Max Payne 2, using the first-person mod, and I found the AI to behave "unfairly" after the first few maps. The AI reached a point where it would: 1) Always rush you; 2) Once an enemy character appeared through a door or around a corner it would target you in less than a second. The whole immersion factor of a shooter game was totally lost at this point. The game became more of a puzzle, trying to determine the best place to stand while defending against multiple enemies rushing towards you, who had no sense of self-preservation, and knew where you where, even through walls and doors. No, Scott Miller, that was not a fun game with the auto-adjusting AI difficulty. Perhaps 3DRealms should give up beta testing and game-making altogether.
I really like the idea that a given game situation may be different between plays, either randomly, due to conscious player actions, due to his playing skill, or from selectable options. That's the entire idea behind Roguelikes. There are lots and lots of ways to do this that are ignored by most developers. (Perhaps because it'd hurt the market for hint books, bleah.)
But there are many things wrong with auto-adjusting difficulty as described in the article. It's open to player abuse, for one thing.
It also makes the game fall victim to what I call Mario Kart syndrome. Mario Kart 64 (not as much Double Dash) had an amazingly cheap AI for the other drivers, on the harder difficulties, that made it impossible to stay in first place for longer than a short period of time. If you wanted to get first place consistantly, you couldn't do it by trying to get and stay in first place the whole race. You were better off staying back a little, picking up attack items and taking him down just before the finish line. That was what I hated most about it, and why we never played the race mode past about a week with the game. I hate the idea that the player is penalized for doing well. He needs to gain some advantage, or at least bonus, recognizing his achievement.
One more thing: auto-adjusting difficulty negates one of the traditional purposes of a video game, namely, to test your skill. Did you get 10 million points by the end merely because you had problems in the first level?
say i'm playing Ghost Recon or Max Payne, i'm going too fast thru an area, and an enemy caps me from behind a good hiding place. he got me that time, but as soon as i replay the section, i know exactly where he is. i suddenly have an unnatural advantage over my enemy.
but put that same guy in a different spot, and now we're back on even ground: neither of us know exactly where the other is.
at least Ghost Recon does a decent job of unpredictable bot pathing, such that most baddies will use cover and plot ways to flank you, instead of running straight at you guns blazing.
and that's the other thing that pisses me off: bad guys with a death wish, and no sense of self preservation. real life lackeys don't attack in waves. they should be just as concerned about getting shot as you are, take cover under heavy fire, and plot alternative means of attack.
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