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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.'"
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.
It is more fun on expert, maybe you just aren't better enough to appreciate it.
Why would it be fun if easy > medium was just more of the same, going up in difficulty should make you have to think different and figure out different techniques.
How would being very good at easy at all prepare you for something too difficult for you? Mastering easy just stunts your skills and makes doing the wrong thing for Expert a reflex, you have to keep pushing your limits in order to improve.
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.
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.
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.
it should be more *fun* to play harder difficulties if your better at the game.
I can tell you that it is indeed fun. If you can't complete the higher difficulty level then obviously you're not 'better at the game'. Being able to play through without ever failing or putting a bit of practice in is not challenging, and for me is therefor not 'fun' either. Try going through the songs more slowly in practice mode if you are finding any sections especially hard (it lets your muscle memory remember the patterns to play, and is especially good for getting used to switching between more akward chord shapes), and remember that the notes go along with the music. I think people on the lower difficulty levels try to watch when the notes pass by the bottom of the screen or something. I just look at the middle to top of the screen to see what is coming, and then play those notes or chords along to the music (though on crazy solos like in Cult of Personality there isn't really any 'music' to play along to, heh, I just try to hit as much as I can.. get around 65-85% of the crazy solos usually).
The harder difficulties are more 'natural' because they mimic the music almost exactly. I already played guitar before playing Guitar Hero so I had a bit of an advantage co-ordination wise, but I can complete a few songs on Hard even on lefty-flip. Playing lefty flip helped me to understand why some people find the co-ordination difficult (and is also the only way to make the game more challenging again now that I have completed all the set list and bonus songs apart from Through the Fire and Flames and the final battle on Expert) :p
which is totally what she said
That is the problem with Guitar Hero 3 though, the 5th fret isn't what makes 'Hard' so much more difficult. What makes it difficult is that the number of notes you have to play doubles for most songs and even more than that for the later ones. This combined with very unforgiving hammer on and pull off sections that require perfect fingering, makes some songs almost impossible without laboriously practicing each part of the song until you can play it perfectly.
What really highlights the problem with Guitar Hero 3 is that there isn't the same problem with Rock Band (or GH1/2 for that matter). The real problem with Guitar Hero 3 is that the note patterns aren't intuitive, they are overly complicated and don't match the song well enough for it to be instinctive to play.
The note patterns Harmonix came up with in GH1 and 2 were very close to the actual songs. Neversoft who developed GH3 just aren't as good at translating songs into notes for the game.