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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."
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...
I agree wholeheartedly. The nice thing about choosing a difficulty is that you get to decide how much challenge you feel like, if you can only afford one game a month then you can play em hard to make the experience last. With ADD your only option is to play it clean through, knowing all along that the enemies are handicapped to accomodate you. That sucks.
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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.
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?"
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.
The solution is really simple:
Dificulty: [Auto]
Easy
Medium
Hard
Nightmare
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Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
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.
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.
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.
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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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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.
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.
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.
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