Dynamic Difficulty Levels: PvE game design theory at work (Destiny)

by cheapLEY , Tuesday, December 26, 2017, 17:25 (2364 days ago) @ Kahzgul

I remember in Morrowind when I got my level 80 guy to the final fight and I one-shot the dude and then got a mace I wouldn't have looked twice at given how far I was in the game. I feel like it was tuned for a level 20 person or something. So I made a new game and blitzed there and got to the boss at level 13, which was hella hard! But fun! And I did it! And then I just reloaded my level 80 guy to keep exploring because I didn't want to spend all that time doing every side quest again. My point being that dynamic leveling allowed me to make the game harder for that part by speeding there to get the challenge I wanted rather than lollygagging around as I'd done earlier. It worked.

Okay, now imagine if you could have just selected a difficulty and had the desired experience the first time you fought Dagoth Ur? Why is having to restart a game and play through hours of content a second time to get that experience somehow a better solution?

The problem with using levels to determine difficulty is that it's almost always hard to actually know how that is going work. What is the base difficulty if I'm perfectly leveled? What's it feel like if I'm +/- 2 levles? How about 5? 10? It's too much guesswork and a whole lot of time and effort to actually get your character to what you want to be.