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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I absolutely love setting the highest difficulty as a challenge for games.
One of the most brilliant "hardest" settings was in Thief, where in the hardest setting, you were not allowed to kill anybody. Hence the whole game became a puzzle of sneaking, with no more than blackjacking someone.
Countless times I heard someone talk about how good they got with the sword in Thief, but I always wondered what the point of that was. If I wanted melee action I'd play some other game.
Accomplishments on Hardest, Never Looking Up Solutions Online
Realized this could probably be done with 1 fighter, though I didn't try it. And no, I'm not lying. You didn't think the bards wrote tales about your pathetic adventures, did you?
And some (partial) failures
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.