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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."
...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...
What is utterly annoying in some games, is not that the game is too hard, but the fact load times are between 30 secs and minute sometimes! It's very frustating.
I think this auto-difficulty has made my MP2 play harder. I am a perfectionist when it comes to games, I don't like getting hit too much and if I do, I just play it out without care, cuz I don't mind dying. And then, when I finish a section well enough, the enemies in the next one become even tougher and tougher.... even on the first maps!
^_^
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.
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.
I have to agree. I used to be "hard core" about games: give me a challenge for my dollar. Now that I can sneak a half hour in on alternating days, if that, I just don't have time to perfect my skills.
... stupid traffic, suiciding AIs to rescue...
As an example of a game that rocked on the difficulty scale: Ratchet and Clank 2. If you ever bump into a difficult patch, go buy a new weapon or upgrade one of the existing ones, and things get easier. If you are rocking, you can keep going, if you are not rocking, the game hands you powerful toys to bring things back into alignment.
Contrast that with Jak II from the same developers. All I can say is "gah, who decided they hate me"
Sig under construction since 1998.
Exactly.
But what vested interest do the programers have for making players better? None. Improvment comes from LAN parties, internet gaming and spending hours and hours playing the game, in short it is self indugence on the part of the gamer.
The counter example might be Morrowind with the expension packs. There improvemnet adds to the next experience as well. Its not like you get to keep all your weapons from Quake 2 to Quake 3.
So do we want to make games that really make games better players? I look at the videos of Doom3 and HL2 and I have to belive that HL2 will make better players and Doom3 will just make me a twitchy mess.
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...
Now that we're well beyond using hand-drawn sprites, I wish we saw more games (are there any?) that didn't just have 4 or 5 basic types that were all clones of each other, but ones where enemies or bystanders come in a wider variety of body types and other variations...
Isn't Half-Life 2 supposed to be going to do this? I'm sure they were saying something about all the scientists looking different.
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...
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
It depebnds on the game. Rainboz Six 3 is supposed to be a high-tension shooter where you have to move caustiously and carefully to avoid dying. In that kind of situation, limited saves makes perfect sense. Max Payne 2 is supposed to be about experiencing the story and creating jaw-droppingly cool gunfights.
Theres not faster way to ruin the sense of fun in that game than by making you play big sections over and over again. So it's a good thing you can autosave.
I have a lot of opinions about Cyborgs and Architects