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Designing Difficulty Options In Games
Gamasutra is running a story about how the "hard" modes in games can be designed to include difficulty, but not frustration. They give some examples of the changes made to several games as their difficulty settings are increased, and they discuss some of the simple options, such as increasing the number of required button presses, or increasing the relevant numbers by an arbitrary amount (a boss on easy may hit you for 10 damage, whereas a boss on hard may act the same but hit you for 100 damage). They also talk about maintaining the "illusion of fairness." Quoting:
"Bungie's Halo series is often praised for its excellent execution of difficult play in the form of its Legendary mode. Not surprisingly, the team took a very well-thought out approach to introducing and tuning difficult play. Halo 3 gameplay designer Francois Boucher-Genesse explains that it's not just a case of one formula fits all. 'It's not like we just cranked every enemy's health by 200% and called it Legendary,' he said. 'There was a good amount of custom changes made per mission as well. In that sense we encourage players with previous Halo experience to play at least on Heroic, since they get to see the game in its full scale.'"
Just follow the id method. Build a nightmare difficultly level into the game but also include God mode.
My biggest gripe with game difficulty that comes to mind is when I feel like it's making the whole thing hard for the sake of being hard. Guitar Hero 3 comes to mind. It's like they're assuming you've played the other Guitar Hero games, were good at them, and only bought the new one because you wanted a bigger challenge. Some of the Tony Hawk games have the same problem, so it's probably those developers.
I can understand wanting a challenge, so I don't think there's anything wrong with it. But the problem manifests itself by having the difficulty curve all wonky. You can be very good at Easy, and still not be able to complete relatively simple songs on Medium. Same with Medium->Hard, and Hard->Expert. Rock Band, on the other hand, can also be pretty challenging, but the curve is more gradual, so IMO it works better. It's clear the developers were focused more on having the game be fun for all levels of expertise, rather than making a good challenge that only hardcore fans will appreciate.
I think this applies for pretty much all games, across genres. Guitar Hero was just what came to mind. Ideally anyone should be able to play, but it should be more *fun* to play harder difficulties if your better at the game.
People forget how hard many of these games are. A perfect play through the game might be 10 minutes, but the "replay" was getting the perfect 10 minutes down by memorizing the exact way to play the game.
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On the contrary, I hate how Civ IV does its difficulty settings.
It's normal and slightly above normal difficulty settings are far too easy. Immortal (the highest setting) is simply designed to cripple you as much as possible while giving the AI bonus cities and resources. The medium-high difficulty settings (which is what I usually play at) are usually pretty balanced between them and me, but the kicker is that the difficulty isn't precisely harder than normal, the game just gives the AI 5 times the units it would normally have. So when you have machine gunners and riflemen gunning down their knights and longbowmen (since it doesn't actually play any smarter), it just takes 5x as long to beat the game, and it just ends up feeling like an eternal slogging march, not fun at all. Personally, I think the approach is just stupid.
Unless you have beaten the computer in Civ IV on Deity difficultly your opinion here is irrelevant!
Roughly half my comments are never submitted. You may be reading the better half...
Spilt cpu intelligent and cpu handy cap / cheating in to there own settings. Do not put them under the same setting. Heroes of might and magic 1 had that.
I wrote a paper in college about how video games could evaluate and adjust difficulty based on metrics while the gamer is playing. I think a game's difficulty that is based off input from the controller and game statistics would help people have a more enjoyable gaming experience.
If the game can receive input from the gamepad/joystick they can measure heat, motion, button hitting frequencies, and things of that nature.
Software inputs can be used too. Time measured in zones, level completion times, and time to defeat creatures can be measured to add as heuristics. Death counts and locations can be used to determine what areas need work.
These inputs have been associated with stress levels in gaming and can be used to adjust creature abilities, time limits, weapon power, and directional support for the gamer. If the gamer is playing well the difficulty will become more difficult over time and if the player is having trouble then the difficulty can be toned down slowly and selectively. Directional help can also be used if the game thinks the gamer is lost.
These could help create a more dynamic game that fits to the gamer.
After having read countless of posts written by the so called gamers, I've come with the perfect set of difficulty settings, that's good for everyone:
1. Normal (an euphemism for 'easy', for people that suck at videogames)
2. Hard (for people that have no life)
3. Iddqd (same as hard, but with the 'God Mode' activated, for people that suck at videogames, but want to feel like the ones that have no life)
The third option can be a hidden feature as these kind of players will happily spend $$$ to know how to access it.
Instead of Easy/Normal/Hard, there should be more amusing titles for them.
For example, the system in Wolfenstein 3D. And I'm sure there are other examples too, outside of id developed games.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
I'm a fan of turn-based strategy games such as Civilization, and yet I usually stop playing most of them after a while because I get angry at the way hard difficulty levels are implemented.
You see, the developers of these games apparently find it too difficult to implement an AI that plays by the same rules as human players and yet provides a good challenge. So AIs cheat. Cheats come in two flavours: information cheats (e.g. send an unprotected valuable unit and you'll see an enemy fighter, who in theory has no way of knowing about your unit, beeline for it) and stats cheats (e.g. the AI produces units 40% faster than you).
I call those special rules "cheats" because they are typically not documented or consistent with the game story. So you end up making blind guesses about what rules the AI is playing by in a very atmosphere-shattering way and trying to adapt to them. It really feels like cheating and drains my interest in otherwise excellent games pretty fast.
After removing the permanent damage (a.k.a health point) it just became a case of throwing more stuff at you all at once.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Has there ever been a first person shooter for where the difficulty level isn't simply an indication of how close you want your enemies to aimbots?
I can easily think of the negative extremes, such as Soldier of Fortune 2, with the infamous jungle level, and my own personal experiences with being shot through thick jungle, repeatedly having grenades land perfectly at my feet from enemies that haven't even seen me yet, and training a sniper scope onto the back of an enemies head at maximum range, only to have him suddenly turn around and go sneaking towards me. And Call of Duty, where increased difficulty was just the games way of asking exactly what percentage of the entire opposition army you wanted to face at once.
I appreciate that Halo tends to take a beating every time it's put forward as a paragon of game design and gaming in general and that the Halo fanboys with mod points will destroy me, but seriously, one of the gripes is with the claim that Halo's AI is somehow fitting of the Legendary title on it's hardest difficulty, when anyone playing the game sans rose-colored glasses has trouble not noticing that the enemies now simply fire faster, harder and lead perfectly.
"It's not like we just cranked every enemy's health by 200% and called it Legendary," he said. "There was a good amount of custom changes made per mission as well ...[snip]... What did make a difference was the time spent tweaking and fixing issues to make the game fun on every difficulty level. All titles had more bad guys, stronger and more accurate enemies with faster projectiles. And they used similar numbers for each of these parameters."
So in other words they made the enemies fire faster, harder and lead better. Thanks for clearing that up.
On the plus side, Far Cry's AI was reasonable, but had noticable holes, such as when it somehow thought it was hidden yet you could clearly see it sneaking towards you down an open dirt track, seemingly with an "If I can't see him then he can't see me" attitude. And if I remember correctly it improved further in Crysis. Although the thing that seems to happen with games like that is as soon as you claim that the AI is brilliant any single example of the AI not working flawlessly has people uploading videos to youtube showing that the AI is completely garbage because of this one time it got stuck on that shark outside the hut or something.
Are there any really decent examples of FPS AI or do we have to still be happy with running the Reaper Bot in Quake?
As I've grown older, I've started to play games for the story, not just the action. While I have nothing against a hard game (and I'm amazed by the things I thought were hard when I was a kid), if I start at too hard of a difficulty level and have to reload my game constantly the immersion really suffers. Unless a game has a means of properly regulating difficulty, I just put it on "normal" and usually yawn my way through combat.
I'm not generally a fan of rubber-band AI, since it's usually poorly implemented and incredibly frustrating — if you gain a new weapon, level, or ability, you want to feel supremely powerful for a little while; you don't want everything else in the game to immediately level up too.
On the other hand, I've started really appreciating games that let the player decide how hard they're going to make the experience on a moment-by-moment basis. In other words, providing the player with an only moderately difficult way to accomplish an objective, but encouraging the player to choose a more difficult path.
I call it the tortoise-and-hare approach, where the player can plod along and never be challenged too greatly, or take great leaps with increased risk for greater reward — even if the reward is merely an ego boost.
For example, in the Splinter Cell games, I sometimes try playing though them as the perfect ghost - never being spotted (except as the script requires). Or I play through with the objective of knocking every guard unconscious, but never killing anyone (again, except as required). You don't fail a mission by pulling out your gun, yet it always feels like a cheap way to complete a task and a method of last resort. I end up regulating my own difficulty level as I play, finding a more challenging approach whenever possible, but able to fall back on easier gameplay when things get tough. Steam and XBox Live have actually embraced this difficulty-optional play style with their achievements systems (anyone remember the gnome from HL2:E2?), though I find it more immersive to play according to my own goals than someone else's.
Sandbox games design an entire game around this method of play; GTA games, for instance, can be easy or maddeningly difficult depending on how the player chooses to play them.
An older take on continuously flexible difficulty is the RPG method. You can usually take time out to power-level your character, or read a FAQ on creating the ultimate build, but it's entirely up to the player. If you'd rather plow on with the story with a weak character, that's fine too. If things get hard later, you can take time out to improve your character some more. Players get to choose how hard the game will be without having to restart with a different difficulty level.
But however it's done, I think that the best games are the ones that don't lock the player into a level of gameplay through the entire game. Different players will find different spots in the game especially challenging. By keeping the difficulty flexible, players can find ways to get through the hardest bits while keeping the rest of the game challenging.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I have to agree. Having played video games from Pong all the way until today, I now play many games for the world experience, rather than the body count or difficulty. I mainly play FPS's, but after umpteem Quake and Doom clones, the whole difficulty thing wears thin. In most games, this is simply a matter of shooting a little better, or twitching a bit more, to take down more enemies. It gets old after a while.
Now, lately I've gone back and replayed or collected all the classics I've missed over the years. Deus Ex, HL, HL2, System Shock 1 & 2, RTCW. All of these games have so much more to do and offer than *SEE* than Doom, or Quake. I spent hours exploring in these games. Heck, even Painkiller and Serious Sam had aspects that went beyond the carnage. They were fun to explore, to try and find the hidden areas, to play around in.
For their times, they each brought something to the table beyond just the killing, even as the games were, in some respects, about the killing.
You have to give kudos especially to games where difficulty is also about resources and allocation. SS1, 2, and Deus Ex brought that element to the table, and made playing the game enjoyable even on low difficulty by making ammo less infinite, and allowing choices to modify the outcome.
There are plenty of examples out there where other elements, be they RPG elements or intelligently designed and properly utilized puzzles, or even spectacular level design have contributed to enjoyable game play and replayability without the need to just swarm you with numbers.
Every Civ game has a level where the AI is matched evenly to you. I believe it is Noble on Civ 4. Regardless, you can look it up and you'll find that at a given difficulty level, the AIs get no benefits or penalties that you don't. The AIs are also operating at full capacity that level, meaning they are using the best tactics they have available to them. Ok, so while they can (and do) make it easier by dumbing down the AIs, they can't make it harder by making them better, as they are as good as it gets. Thus to increase difficulty they have to start giving the AIs unfair advantages.
There really isn't a way around this. Sure you can say "Make harder AIs," but it isn't as though it is just as easy as that. AI programming in games isn't easy, and they aren't sandbagging on purpose. They are doing their best.
If you don't like it you can tune Civ in other ways to make it harder. For example give the AI's more special units or buildings. Heck maybe give them all of them. You change that in the CIV4CivilizationInfos.xml file, it is pretty self explanatory what you need to change to grant special units/buildings to a given Civ.
Also you might try a different game. Galactic Civilizations II is reputed to have some very devious AIs at higher levels. You might give it a shot and see if it is more to your liking.
Finally you can always play other humans. You aren't guaranteed how hard they'll be, but there are ones waaaaay better than any computer out there.
Although not a perfect example mind you, WoW had a fight (and will have a couple more in WotLK) that are like this.
From vanilla there was the Bug Trio where you had to fight 3 bugs at a time and depending on the order you killed them, you gained different loot, but each bug had a special ability that was hard to handle, so generally you wanted to kill the one with the hardest to handle ability first.
And in WotLK there is a fight where you have to fight 3 black dragons (one at a time for normal mode) and a boss (fought after you slay the dragons in normal mode), but if you wish, you can fight all 4 at the same time and you then are rewarded for every black dragon that you keep alive when you kill the boss, if you leave 1 alive, you get 1 extra epic, if you leave 2, you get 2 extra epics, one of which is better than the average loot from there, and if you leave 3, you get the previous loots plus a black dragon mount.
It's not a perfect difficulty system but at least provides players with a choice.
Translating the gibberish, that should be handicap, not "handy cap".
I usually found difficulty modes in these types of games to be a charade anyway. In Id software's older games, they simply tweaked the damage points both for the player and the opponent. An Imp in easy mode has twenty health, thirty on normal and fifty on hard. His projectiles do 20% damage on easy, but 50% on hard. There are ten Imps in hard mode where there were five in easy mode, etc.
Some newer games have the right idea in allowing the player to choose the difficulty of the mission ingame. Engines are open and varied enough these days to allow the player alternatives for every situation. They also present the choice of taking the path directly in front of the machine gun nest or avoiding it completely. That is what creates a difficulty setting.
More adept players will want to try experimenting while more novice players might shy away from anything that will probably get them killed one hundred times.
Aise from better AI, the real solution is two things:
1) Split the difficulty level and the "extra stuff for the AI to cheat with" into two user controlled sliders. That way we can face the brilliant general without him getting an extra 30 starting troops, etc.
2) Please, for the love of Zork, let us ADJUST THE DIFFICULTY ON THE FLY! I'm looking at you Dawn of War... Ditto for game speed in the non turn based ones.
I can't ever win against the pc at the highest difficulty level on a big map, even with pause, but the next lower level is too easy :(
I want to fight the easy one at the beginning, build up my army and then face the good opponent where it's strategy deciding the battle, not click speed.
if you gain a new weapon, level, or ability, you want to feel supremely powerful for a little while
Hehe - when I'm playing an engaging FPS and I come across a new weapon, I tend to get scared.
There are three areas AI is actually advancing - robotic control (MIT's learning heli's, fuzzy controllers), computational finance (billions of dollars being managed by humans augmented with AI's), and game design. Of those, only game AI is accessible to the average researcher. It's the future.
Three rights make a left. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly.
System Shock 1 had separate difficulty sliders for Combat, Puzzles, Plot, and Cyber. If you found the Cyberspace too hard and the meat space combat too easy, you could set Cyber to 1 and Combat to 3. These sliders also went down to 0, so you could remove one aspect of the game entirely. If you didn't like the puzzles, set it to 0 and you won't have to do them.
"No motherfucking out-of-nowhere impossible-to-shoot-down-in-time kill-absolutely-any-unit" planes in the second campaign mission 3. Fuck that and fuck whoever programmed it in.
I couldn't read TFA because its filtered here for some reason, but I have several problems with difficulty options and AI (which, obviously, go hand-to-hand in most games).
First, a lot of games program an absolutely brilliant AI to the best of their abilities, and then make it randomly "make mistakes" or be artificially and severely limited in its range of abilities. The classic example is snooker/pool games. The AI can do ANY shot absolutely perfectly, given a few seconds to calculate the physics. I know that even as far back as the first versions of Virtual Pool / Virtual Snooker there was no way to beat the top-end player because they could easily manage "147" and other perfect breaks and you wouldn't even get a shot to try to re-coup your loss. But the "basic" players in those games will quite happily miss a straight-line 8-ball pot because they have "been too good" lately, so they mess it up deliberately, and then when they are losing doing a four-cushion bounce shot with spin, jumping up on the rail to pot the ball, and end up in the exact position for the next ball. This just makes the human player feel alternately completely overwhelmed, or like there is no challenge. The fix is to make the AI aware of "difficult" shots versus "simple" shots and then to choose his shot and also adjust the scale of a random error occurring accordingly - an "amateur" trying a three ball curve shot will be miles off (and probably would never try it anyway), a "professional" trying a straight pot might be a pixel or two off but it would hardly matter. Some programs get this right, most don't.
The other problem with AI is when the AI isn't actually anywhere near intelligent - it just blindly does the same thing (I've seen some game "AI" code which is nothing more than "if" statements and lists of buildings/units to build in a set order) but because it's been "souped-up", by doing things at speeds vastly beyond human capabilities, or by being given a deliberate advantage (e.g. in terms of money, capacity, hit points, strength, numbers etc.). If the human player had that speed or those capabilities, it would whop the AI. Doubling the computers hit points does not make it a better player, and does not make up for terrible AI. The fix for this is to send both the human and computer inputs through the same input layer (so it is, in effect, "playing" the game itself) and make sure that it can't send commands through that any faster than the average human (or a slightly above-average human on slightly harder difficulty levels) and NEVER any faster than the best human. It is already capable of being pixel-perfect and spotting every enemy on the screen, so it makes up for the human's better pattern-matching abilities, but it shouldn't be able to react any faster than a human (to make up for the computer's much quicker response times) and so turns, shoots, etc. are "ordered" at the same rate as a human clicking a mouse.
The most frustrating problem, however, is an AI that just doesn't know how to react to a certain event. I just replayed Red Alert because it was released as freeware. In the first ten or so Allied levels, there is one mission, set inside a base with only infantry units on both sides, which relies on the human player discovering a Tanya at the other end of the map, not losing more than one or two infantry units and avoiding many groups of ten or twenty enemies that hunt them down on performing certain events. The only way to play it is to have a save/load button handy and to carefully take out every single enemy unit. The units never work this out and just follow their same set walking patterns.
Then in the next mission, the computer has "free reign" of a large map and just sends airborne-units and the occasional tank at you. Literally, once every five minutes or so a tank or two would wander towards a set point, where you obviously place your turrets and best units, and commits suicide. In later levels the computer even uses its special buildings to make the tank "invincible" for a fe
In a lot of modern games, the difficulty level is basically just more + faster. If you know what you have to do but just physically can't do it, that's not really a "difficulty" setting in the same way as adjusting the complexity or length of the puzzles to be solved. If "hard" required more brainpower and ingenuity instead of faster button-mashing, i'd be much more inclined to call that a good difficulty setting.
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There's a good discussion here. Too much in gaming lately is controlled and dictated by the "difficulty uber alles" people; the hardcore gamers who always, no matter what, insist everything's too easy and (erroneously) believe that difficulty yields fun.
This game brought forth some ideas on difficulty. Perhaps they have it implemented and I've yet to explore.
FU has some puzzles strewn about the world. Most keys are highlighted to where you just need to find out how to interact. 90% of the answers are given. You just need to find the right combo.
It makes me think, that for RPG, or adventure games, where you need to find certain items, or interact in the world, that in "easy" mode, the answers are all highlighted in some way. turning up the difficulty, makes them highlight on mouse over, and the highest setting is like the Old School days, you'd need to click around, and "look around" to find the objects to interact.
FPS games can be tweaked as well. You modify reaction time, accuracy, health, rate of fire and several other options. Tweak the settings per level increase and let the player realize the enemies just got a whole lot smarter on super hard.
The harder missions were basically the same, but you had to fulfill more objectives, or not kill any innocent people, or accomplish the mission on a time limit. That was one of the most satisfying experiences I can recall in any FPS ever.
Also, what do you do about situations where a player has played a game to certain spot and starts over... the game would assume that this player is far more advanced that he really is as he didn't make a single wrong move up to that point
Randomize the game world slightly for each campaign, causing the player to have to make the mistakes inherent in exploration. Animal Crossing does this. Diablo does this.
Does anyone else find that in Street Fighter 2, the computer opponent takes nearly twice the same amount of HP as you do?
It annoys me when computer opponents are not smarter, just stronger.
EXACTLY what I came here to say.
Especially in historical or war simulation RTS or turn-based games, I want the AI to be smart as hell but not to have any "fake" advantages. The Total War series is especially annoying in this regard; the AI is notoriously stupid in battle, and turning up the difficulty just gives their units better stats. I don't want the AI to "cheat". I want it to play smart. Ambush me, try something a little wild once in a while, attempt some real strategy but be ready to fall back on "charge and hope for the best" if I counter it.
One should always implement the level where there is no way of complete it unless you have tried it at least a couple of hundred times. After once completing it, one also should be able to do it again with not too much effort.
The World Ends With You on the DS has some of the best customizable difficulty settings that I've ever seen. You can choose to control both screens or one, adjust your level, adjust speed, adjust difficulty, and change the AI on your partner as well.