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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.'"
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.
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.
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