Difficulty is certainly a touchy subject that has recently gotten a lot of debate in some sectors of the gaming fanbase. There are people arguing about whether video games have become far too easy in recent years or if it was a good change for the difficulty to be toned down.
Back when video games were first becoming popular, there was a clear reason for difficulty. If a player could blow through an arcade game in one round of quarters, then the creators obviously failed. The point was to get everyone to spend their weekly allowance to keep on trekking after a game over, getting them to move on once they ran out of money so a new customer could step up and begin feeding the machine its delicious metal currency dinner.
Yet, as games transferred over to consoles, game designers saw reason to keep the difficulty element in games. Why? The reasons were obvious when you watched a kid playing on the old arcade machines. A kid didn’t shrug and walk away when he fell to the awesome boss at the end of a level. No. He pumped in more corners, adorned his game face, and wore out the buttons on the machine with a vengeance. He grew attached to the villains of the game and held a determination to triumph in his heart. This kept many going for hours if they had the resources.
Now why would a person spend over a hundred dollars on a console followed by more money dished out for each game if they could blow through it on their first playthrough without batting an eyelash? Developers brought difficulty to the home consoles to make games last longer and to help the players get more involved. It certainly helped players learn to despise the evil forces terrorizing the digital world even if said evil was only a few pixels when they couldn’t beat him in one go or even ten attempts.
Yet, as time goes on, game companies seem to be padding games with more and more content that isn’t quite difficult to pad up the length of the games so that you do not feel bad about spending fifty dollars on a small metal disc. Many see this as a disturbing trend and point to another eventual decline in gaming. Many others yet see this as a welcomed change as that difficulty isn’t needed as you no longer play games by the game over in modern years, so now everyone has a chance to clear through the latest title on the shelf instead of just the best of the best.
Still, some difficulty is definitely needed in video games. Why else would you play a video game in the first place if not for some challenge? Yet, more companies are tossing in time sinks and other false difficulty that only take down the quality of the game as a whole.
False Difficulty – The Bad and the Ugly
There are several things that are used to beef up total play times in video games nowadays that were not around on the original home consoles or arcade machines; some are good like well-thought out and beautiful cut scenes while others can be quite despicable. The most blatant slight that they will toss at gamers is false difficulty, which I will define for usage in my blog as: Any moment in a video game that is not meant to challenge a player’s ability but to deliberately take up their time, effort, and patience with little reward in turn and no concern for fairness.
The most prominent time sink lacking in any real difficulty would be the grind. In no way is it difficult at all to kill the faceless and weak random minions hundreds of times until your allies like you enough or until you finally find that super rare drop. It is only a waste of time. Small grinds are certainly acceptable and can add to the difficulty of a game for sure. Yet, if you have to kill thousands of the same NPC with no difference in the grind that is one word: monotonous.
Grinds have appeared in many video games and while they most prominently exist in the genre of RPGs and MMORPGs (especially the latter), many other games have picked up on the most efficient, from a developer standpoint, time sink to place into games. I have played more and more platformer or adventure titles that require you to run the same level over and over again without any added difficulty to unlock later levels. Certainly, it is fine to have a player go through a level again with a new objective such as adding harder enemies everywhere or setting everything on fire around them, but having them coast through the same exact level again and again to earn level-unlocking points is simply ridiculous.
While on that subject, when I say that adding difficulty to a level and having the player run it again is fine, I mean that real difficulty needs to be added. One of the most frustrating things to exist in the world of video games are speed runs. Some are a good type of frustrating, certainly! Yet, many more are excessive difficult and require everything to be done perfectly, for the stars and planets to align, and for you to have bribed the game console with several dinners and other acts I shall not mention on this blog. Speed runs requiring you to be nearly perfect can be fine, but that is certainly rare. The problem comes from random elements. Enemy movements, rising and falling platforms, and other things that make you have to wait or spend time doing something other than running to the goal can make those near-perfect speed runs the most tedious things in existence.
Perhaps the next most common form of false difficulty added as a shortcut are computer opponents that cheat. While it is quite common to shout that the AI pulled a fast one on you whenever something just happens to go wrong, there are many games where over the years fans have proved that the computers do have it out for the players. In the past this was done to make up for places where AI programming lacked for a multitude of reasons, yet those reasons are disappearing fast. AI cheating is perhaps most notable in racing games or any competitive games with random elements. In many racing games, computers will suddenly drive faster than would be possible if you drove their car when they are off the screen. If you’ve maintained too far a lead in the current league, they may even begin to cheat while still on your screen; ignoring obstacles, gaining items without passing through an item box, going far faster than their car make should allow, or defying the laws of physics if they bump into you.
The final bit of false difficulty I want to touch on, I actually mentioned in the first water article I wrote. I read in a discussion on the upcoming Ocarina of Time remake someone’s opinion who was furious for them making the game easier… All because they are going to simplify the equipping of the Iron Boots. You will no longer have to go into the start menu and flip around the menus before denying that you want to save because you used the wrong button to exit the menu. This is the exact type of false difficulty I am speaking about. It does make you take more time to get through the Water Temple, but there is no true difficulty added to it from fiddling around in the menus; only tedium and annoyance. And now I promise to not rant much more on that topic… Too much.
Real Difficulty – The Good and the Really, Really, Really Good
Whereas false difficulty is the poison seeping into video games, real difficulty is the cure and the antidote. Now, what is real difficulty? I would define it as elements added to the game with the purpose of challenging the player’s skills and helping the player to grow in his abilities at playing the game.
So now we’re not just talking about making a super hard game, we’re talking about having a game that teaches you how to play it and helps you gain the skills needed for later challenges you will face during your time playing it. A good learning curve is the utmost key for any video game to be fun. Too low of a leveling curve and the game will be boring and likely packed with the more tedious forms of false difficulty. Too steep of a learning curve and the game inherits false difficulty for the reason of not preparing the player for what was ahead, causing plenty of needless frustration.
There are many good ways to difficulty to levels the player has already been through, even without changing a thing on the level. A requirement to collect or destroy all of a certain object can certainly be a fantastic way to accomplish this if done correctly. The player will likely not hit them all or be able to get them all on the first play through and that automatically adds a more challenging revisit to the level. A series that gets this perfect in its golden age would have to be the Crash Bandicoot series. While many of the later levels are innately hard, plenty of the early and ‘easy’ levels can be quite difficult when you have to break every single crate along the way.
The best moment for a truly difficult encounter usually comes in a boss encounter. By their very name, they should test a player’s skill to see if they are ready to progress in a game. Not only should they be a test, but also it feels better to lose over and over again to a boss than to the random preceding level as bosses are supposed to be tough. Yet, there seems to be a disturbing trend lately where many bosses are just not terribly difficult. Don’t get me wrong, there are still plenty of nice boss fights out there, yet the number seems to be declining. One of the major problems seems to be that boss fights have been sped up. While I went on a rant about grinds earlier, some repetition in a game is definitely necessary. A boss needs to check if you have really learned the skills you were supposed to have gained in the previous levels and this means repeatedly checking those. A short boss fight that only requires you to use a maneuver once is prone to people brute forcing it or just getting lucky once and winning. A truly difficult boss fight needs some length to it.
A successful boss fight, from a design perspective, needs many things to ensure it is adequately difficult and keeps that learning curve on its way up a perfect slope. The boss needs to take some time, as I mentioned, yet the reason it needs to take time is that it needs to test various things. Not only should every random boss test the skills that took you through the last level, the final boss fight should test the skills that took you through the game. It’s become a common belief that in RPGs, the final boss of the game always pales in comparison to previous bosses, even the final villain’s previous forms. While tougher optional bosses are always a treat as far as difficulty goes, it rarely seems like a final boss from RPGs truly tests what the characters learned throughout the game and his lieutenants do a much better job of that. Optional bosses and harder modes of bosses do help bring this around, as they allow the common crowd to finish the game while giving the truly skilled players something to do, yet the final boss should be a bit better in most of these games.
Yet, I do want to list the game that I believe best hit the nail on the head when it came to the difficulty of the final boss battle. Banjo-Kazooie’s final boss battle came at you in two parts. You may laugh, but the first part of the fight was a game show. You were quizzed on elements of the game, made to play harder versions of various mini-games and events, and made to work both your brain and controller in a well-made equal mixture. Then, after a false credits sequence, you were pitted against the real final battle which made you use every collectable item you stocked up with and the various abilities you had to learn to make it to this point in the game. The fight itself progressively ramped up as it went onwards, lending more and more challenge that led to a truly memorable and difficult game ending.
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