Difficulty Levels 1-7

by Cold, Wednesday, April 24, 2013, 12:44 (4013 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Once upon a time I was talking with all sorts of people at Valve and having a good time. One of the designers on Portal 2 said that they pretty much eliminated the twitch puzzles from the first game, because as a puzzle game, it was frustrating to KNOW the solution, but struggle to actually execute it. The act of solving the puzzle and arriving at the solution should be the hard part.

Same thing with action games. If I have the skill, or knowledge of the game required to play at a high level, then it's frustrating having to get gear merely to compete on higher levels of difficulty. Imagine you're the best Destiny player in the world, but you can't play on level 7 because you don't have a piece of good gear. You're stuck having to acquire gear, i.e. not running and jumping and shooting stuff. Basically, you're no longer playing the real game. You have to do bullshit in order to keep playing even though you are the best player in the world.

Firstly, I don't recall the twitch puzzles that you're talking about, but I have no problem with the idea of "struggling" to execute the solution, whether it's known previously or not. I would argue the opposite actually (at least in action games, discovering the solution is pretty much the name of the game when it comes to puzzle games). Some of the most frustrating moments I've had while playing video games is when I did not know what to do (ie: did not know the solution). Execution, and the pursuit of execution, to me, is the fun part. This train of thought is vastly supported by pretty much every raiding guild in every MMO (not to mention every RL sport, but that's another argument). Nearly no guilds learn the boss fights by first hand experience and trial and error, they [mostly] all learn the fights through "reading the strats". This fact lends credibility to the idea that the fun is in the execution.

More relevant to my original post though, I do not mean to suggest that I would want Destiny yo be a "farming" game. Every level of difficulty would have different mechanics and therefore be a different experience, regardless of the gear that you are wearing. Say you begin on level 3 difficulty and the first boss has 3 primary abilities, after a few attempts you master evading his offense and you beat him. Fast forward to level 4 difficulty. The first boss now has 3 primary abilities and 2 secondary abilities. Again, you struggle to execute the proper defense to beat him. Finally after you figure out your failures, you bring him down. These are 2 completely different experiences on the same boss, you should therefore feel like you are not being forced to farm gear, you are merely experiencing all the game has to offer. Let's say you are an incredibly coordinated person with fast reflexes and quick thinking and were able to start on level 4 difficulty and bring down the first boss...Awesome, you get level 4 difficulty gear, but you've missed the experience of level 3 difficulty's first boss. That's not a terrible loss considering there are still 3 more different variations, harder versions of that boss.

I guess what it comes down to is that you would not necessarily feel like you are merely getting gear to compete at the higher difficulties. Rather, you are experiencing the lesser difficulties so that you can experience the greater difficulties.

This idea, to me, fixes Borderlands failures of True Vault Hunter Mode and Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode--where each mode is essentially the same experience as the last.