Game for Thought: Is Choosing your own Difficulty Relevant Anymore?

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With the exception of sport games, due to the high level of difficulty it can server for new players, some folks don’t think we need a “Choose your own difficulty” option in video games anymore. It seems like an out dated option we’ve been holding on to since the early years of home console video games. Some developers believe it adds longevity to the game and others take the chance to add new abilities or achievements to reward you on your completion of a higher difficulty, but others think it’s just an antiquated idea that we can go without nowadays.

Let me go back to the first sentence I wrote and explain myself. Sport games are different from your everyday average RPG, shooter, or adventure title. In the non-sports title a difficulty setting shouldn’t be necessary; instead what a lot of games already do is have the difficulty grow as you progress through the game – like lots of games do in this day and age including the Legend of Zelda series. On the other side of the argument this would give gamers another reason to replay the adventure they’ve already completed. Developers take the advantage of the difficulty setting now by adding new ones after your completion of the campaign and even adding in achievements or trophies for completing your game in the harder difficult – this is a good thing for a lot of achievement whores out there.

Difficulty is always one of the hardest things to balance out in the game so I’m not going to do any back seat game developing and talk about something I have no experience in so it’s understandable why a lot of titles take the choice of difficulty route over the progressing difficulty. To this day in racing games it’s pretty hard to find a nice balance where you can’t lose your place after racing ninety percent of the track in first place and ending up in seventh just because of a measly error during a turn, or just the balancing on how far the AI controlled vehicles should stay behind you when you’re at your best and how aggressive they are to each other and you depending on your place on the track. So I turn to you, the reader, what do you think about difficulties? Would you rather play without them and rely on the progression system to advance and balance the difficulties depending on your level of skill or would you rather choose your own setting and either speed through the game on easy or take a more challenging route voluntarily?

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Jonathan Nunez

May 19, 2010 11:22

nicely done!

Jeffrey Sandlin

May 20, 2010 09:31

Difficulty levels are absolutely manditory for most games, IMO, because I have not seen a game yet that struck the proper balance of being challenging enough for people who want to be pushed to the limit while not being arbitrarily frustrating for people who want to play more casually. Fallout 3, for example, was frustrating as hell for me, until I turned the difficulty down a few notches. After that a game I would have sold in 3 days in disgust turned into a game I spent 60 hours with and bought a bunch of DLC for.

Not everyone has the patience to churn through what some developers consider a 'fair' difficulty curb. I in particular hate having to trial and error anything in a game more then two times to succeed. I feel it robs me of the immersion of the experience and is nothing more then the game insulting me because it failed to teach me how to play it. So for my low impact play style I need as much opportunity to adjust difficulty levels as I can get.

In the other direction I think that higher difficultly levels need to be more balanced. I had fun beating legendary on Halo 1, but halo 2 and halo 3's legendary difficulties seemed to be ridiculous. Each weapon took 3 times as much to kill anything and you were made of straw. Sure it's harder but making things harder just by turning up a few dials ruins the fun of the game, turning everything into a boring slow mess where you spend more time trying to cheat the system and find easy ways to kill things fast then you do coming up with actual tactics. The difficulty in halo 2 was so broken that the 'noob combo' was manditory for beating it, because it was the only effective way to kill the enemies when they had such boat loads of shields and health. When a semi obscure trick to exploit the weaknesses of the shield and health system is more reliable to kill enemies then your normally one hit kill sniper and rockets, you've officially let your difficulty ruin your game's balance.

Chris Charlton

May 22, 2010 17:30

I've been playing metro 2033 on 360 at the same time as looking back to Tomb Raider Underworld on ps3. The latter has the most friendly customisable difficulty I've seen, allowing you to tweak enemy damage, ammo counts, jump timing windows and more, but my first hour with it was met with frustration since it communicates objectives to the player poorly, even with a hint system and controls are weak, making for more of a challenge that the sliders don't fix.

Metro 2033 meanwhile has the difficulty perma set to freaking hard, without the level of customisation TRL has, but if I were to tweak the thing so my gas mask wouldn't keep breaking, or I wouldn't have to worry about where the next bullets were coming from, I'd be far less frustrated, but missing the soul of the experience.

I'd like to see adaptive difficulty become the de facto standard- the last Madden I played had custom difficulty based on the number of passing and running plays I was able to perform successfully, and you could apply that t, say, an FPS looking at accuracy and so forth. I guess it'd bring its own set of issues though.

Brandon Guerrie

May 23, 2010 08:20

I always love the choice of choosing the difficulty. I normally play it on normal, since most of the time it has the challenge of "just right." Now, as far as Zelda games are concerned, this is a feature the series needs to add on to. Wind Waker, Ocarina of Time, and Twilight Princess are all great games, but the challenges of enemies and bosses (especially Ganondorf) were all too easy. I hope in the next installment they include this feature--many gamers would like to switch to a more moderate challenge. Nice article!