Most games do a poor job of handling difficulty levels (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Monday, December 04, 2017, 11:54 (2625 days ago) @ Funkmon

I’m sure I’ve ranted about this before, but better handling of difficulty levels is near the top of my list of things I wish developers would handle better.

There are several problems that I see on a regular basis:

“Easy” is only actually easy for experts

Modern videogames are a bit impenetrable for anyone who hasn’t been playing videogames for quite some time. And most games fail to make “easy” helpful for players who aren’t already deeply skilled and familiar with modern controls and mechanics.

Years ago, I got my ex-wife (who’s played her share of games... loves Mario Kart, God of War, the original Prince of Persia) to try playing Mass Effect 3. It had a difficulty setting called “narrative”, which was pitched as being so easy that “non-gamers” could jump in and enjoy the story without any problems. My ex got to the first combat encounter, died repeatedly while swinging her reticule around wildly, spinning in circles, shooting into the air, etc. 3 tried in a row, she completely ran out of ammo because she was having so much trouble hitting a target. The 1 or 2 times she did manage to hit something, they died almost instantly. But the game did nothing to make her targets easier to hit. She soon gave up, feeling dejected because this supposedly super-easy setting was still insanely hard for her. Where was increased auto-aim, look-centering, or regenerating ammo that would make the game playable for a true NOVICE?

The thing is, this is how most games scale difficulty. They reduce enemy health, damage output, and aggressiveness, maybe give the player some extra ammo, and call it a day. In some games, that’s enough (God of War, for example, is wonderfully playable even for videogame rookies). But with many games, those tweaks alone fail to address the barriers that make the game so challenging for new players. Dual-stick movement & look controls, for example, are not easy to just pickup and run with, especially when you’re required to shoot your gun at moving targets at the same time.

Some games actually handle these issues well. I played some Star Wars Battlefront 2 with my girlfriend last week... she loves videogames, but doesn’t have much experience with 3D first or 3rd person games. But the game has such a wealth of customization options that I was able to set things up for her in a way that we were able to play together, and she had a blast. I was able to increase her health while decreasing enemy health, setup the match so that she’d always spawn as one of the hero characters (swinging a lightsaber in 3rd person is easier mechanically than aiming a gun), and I reduced the cooldown on her Jedi powers so that she could spam her abilities at will, and block enemy fire almost indefinitely. Long story short, the game gave me the tools to customize the experience in a way that truly suited a novice player.

Another game that deserves a shoutout in this regard is the Forza franchise. Similarly to Battlefront 2, Forza goes above and beyond in terms of offering incredible levels of customization. You can choose which elements of the driving mechanics you want to engage with, and which ones you want the game to handle for you. There are built-in mechanics like the dynamic racing line, automatic breaking, anti-lock breaks, in addition to the more standard options like automatic or manual transmission. And best of all, these settings are not “global”... I can play online with a friend who is an expert player, and he and I can have completely different driving options selected to customize our personal experiences, and still play together.

Another big issue:

Developers often ruin their game’s mechanics with certain difficulty settings

Halo is a prime example of this. Playing Halo on easy does very little to make the game more approachable for a true gaming novice (they’ll still end up spinning in circles with their gun pointed straight up in the air). What they do is neuter the mechanics to the point where the game looses its depth. A novice can understand “see that Elite? you need to break his shields with an energy weapon, then switch to bullets to finish
him off.” They just need help aiming and hitting their target. Halo does the opposite. It provides no help when it comes to hitting targets, and normalizes the damage output of your weapons to the point where the energy/ballistic mechanics don’t matter.

These kinds of difficulty setting issues extend in the opposite direction as well. Playing Halo on Legendary is rarely as much fun as Heroic or Normal, because they crank up enemy behaviours to the point where their actions are no longer balanced within the sandbox. They shoot faster and more accurately than you can move. No amount of masterful player movement will let you evade their attacks. So instead, Legendary Halo turns into a camping-fest. You often need to break encounters by engaging from such extreme long range that the enemies don’t shoot back. Most of the gameplay sandbox isn’t viable, because you simply won’t survive any attempt to engage with them. Lots of games fall into this trap too.

That’s where the question of “what is the ‘right’ difficulty setting to play on?” question comes into play. Any time my friends would ask me, I’d tell them that they really should be playing Halo on Heroic... not out of any sense of difficulty “snobbery”, but because Bungie tuned Heroic to be the setting where all the games mechanics are fully balanced with each other, and you can tell when you play it. All the nuances that make Halo so much deeper and more engaging than most shooters are watered down or completely gone when you play on Normal or Easy.
Now, if a player knows this, and still decides to play on easy because that’s the sort of laid-back experience they’re looking for, then that’s totally cool. I just wish Bungie (and other developers) would do a better job of making “Easy” work in a way that is actually helpful for novice players, without gutting the mechanics that make their game interesting and fun.