Impossible games have a pretty good track
record. The Impossible Quiz. That Winnie the Pooh baseball game. Mission Impossible. Impossible Mission. But not every game has to be that hard. Maybe you’d like to tone it down a little. For that, we need to talk about Difficulty
Options. Difficulty options have been around since
the Atari days. Games have always had to strike a balance
between being challenging enough to be fun but not too hard to be overwhelming. As with most things that have been aro
und
this long, game designers over the years have come up with a lot of ideas for how to tinker
with difficulty in a game. Some great, others… really, really bad. Difficulty can mean so many things and will
look a little different in almost every type of game. Let’s walk down the paths that other games
have used to deal with difficulty and see some exotic options that are out there to
help games feel just right for the biggest audience possible. Turn down the difficulty of learning math
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Thanks, Brilliant! So why are there difficulty options, anyway? Wouldn’t it just be easier to design a game
once, in one way, and leave it at that? Sure, it would be, but your audience is going
to suffer if you stick to that too hard. Games have a Goldilocks problem. For most people, most of the time, games are
only fun if their difficulty lands in a sweet spot. Not too easy, and not too hard. Go too easy, and the game can feel patronizing. God of War Ragnarok is notorious for having
your partne
r character blurt out hints or even the whole solution almost as soon as
you get to a puzzle. The idea was to keep some players from dropping
out of the game entirely if they got to a puzzle they couldn’t solve themselves. It’s a nice thought. There’s nothing worse than a brick wall
of a puzzle you can’t seem to make any headway on, but the devs didn’t receive any complaints
from the testers about puzzle spoilers. They never added an option to stop or delay
how long it took for your companion to
spoil the answer, so you get the hint whenever the
game decides you need one. Which is almost immediately. In trying to get as many people as possible
through the puzzles, they annoyed the larger pool of players that wanted to solve it themselves. After all, if a game is going to tell you
the solution right away, why bother having the puzzle there to begin with? Games that are too hard can be bad, too. Bubsy is notorious for its cheap, unforgiving
difficulty. Bubsy has the constitution of a wet
paper
bag and will keel over if he gets brushed by a gumball. The game is a Sonic-inspired platformer with
a good amount of speed, but that creates situations where you’re jumping around almost blind. Imagine Sonic with one-hit kills. Land wrong, and you’re done. It’s not too bad if you memorize the level,
but c’mon, who’s gonna memorize Bubsy? Cheap, unforeseeable progress loss is among
the most annoying things a game can do, and Bubsy’s full of it. But what does ‘too easy’ or ‘too hard’
even
mean? Well, that’s the trickiest part of the problem. It’s different for different people. A 5-year-old playing her first Mario game
doesn’t have the skill, coordination, experience, or expectations her 35-year-old father might
have. Two brothers that run a YouTube channel about
video games might have one that can finish Super Metroid like a normal person and one
that can’t platform in it to save his life. -Mike, in the background: HEY! -Dan: OH, YOU HATE THE TRUTH NOW? The same difficulty would
be hard-pressed
to keep the game fun for everyone. Not only that, but the ‘sweet spot of difficulty’
is even different for the same person at different times. The first time you opened up Devil May Cry,
you were way worse at the game than you might be now. If you played Street Fighter IV on release,
you might be a lot worse these days at it. The sweet spot is a constantly moving target,
and difficulty options help you spread out your shots to make it easier to hit where
you need to hit. One siz
e literally cannot fit all. There’s another insidious factor at play
that makes setting game difficulty tricky. Developers are notorious for being terrible
judges of how hard their own games are. It’s not their fault, though. It’s a natural and maybe inescapable part
of game development. Solo indie devs especially run into this problem
all the time. They’re playing, testing, thinking, and
designing the tricks in the game they’re making. They literally know everything there is to
know about it. B
y the time the game is finished, they’ve
played it hundreds or thousands of times. At that point, what feels tricky and fun to
the dev will feel impossibly difficult to someone coming into the game fresh. Those Difficulty Blinders are one of the reasons
live playtesting is so valuable. Mark Brown found out exactly this while making
his magnet game, and shared the experience in his most recent GMTK video whose thumbnail
gave me a mini heart attack when it popped up this week. I thought he made ro
ughly this same video
for a second. Dodged a bullet there. So! If you’re ready to design some difficulty
levels into your game, where do you start? Well, you could start with the basics. Game Quantities. These are tweaks to a lot of the numbers and
options that you’re probably already familiar with. Halo comes with four official difficulty options:
Easy, Normal, Heroic, and the legendary… Legendary. Each option changes a host of variables that
influence basic game mechanics, like shield strength
, health, and weapon damage. Higher difficulties boost both enemy attributes
and nerf your own, as you’d expect. You might have half the shields and health
while each enemy has twice as much as on Normal. The mix of units you encounter in any given
fight can change, with Flood enemies getting equipped with weapons more often or boosting
how many Stealth Elites you have to take care of to get through a section. Instead of fighting two of them in Normal,
Legendary might give you four to six of the
m in the same place. Enemy AI dramatically changes as well. On Legendary, everyone becomes much more accurate
and fires faster than normal. Tactics can even change, where enemies might
group up more often rather than go it alone. Halo’s suite of health, damage, and behavioral
tweaks are a Greatest Hits of the tried-and-true difficulty modifier options that many games
use, and most people likely first think about when they think of what changing a game’s
difficulty means. Of course, just tweaking
sliders isn’t a
fix-all. If that’s all you do to change difficulty
levels, it’s not hard to wind up with a more difficult but less fun game. Metroid is one of my favorite series, but
its approach to a Hard Mode rarely ever feels right to me. Let’s use Metroid Dread as an example. On Normal, the game is already challenging,
but fair. Enemies deal a lot of damage. Attacks can be tricky to deal with and require
all your abilities like 360 aiming, parrying, and dashing to precisely dodge and counte
rattack. The enemies and bosses are pattern-based and,
while difficult, it feels very possible to get through the fights without taking damage
if you know what you’re doing. Maybe you’ll struggle in your first playthrough,
but you’ll figure it out if you stick with it. The game’s Hard Mode doesn’t really ramp
up the challenge. Instead of changing enemy placement, behaviors,
or adjusting things like parry timing to make things more challenging, the game really just
makes enemies hit harder. Navig
ation and exploration stays the same. The cat-and-mouse stealth segments with the
EMMI robots are completely unchanged. It’s the same game, just with a little less
room for error. The early game on Hard forces you to be extra
cautious and punishes minor mistakes more, but the bosses aren’t really any different
if you had already learned to avoid damage. The game’s highest difficulty, ‘Dread’,
boils that down even more to just a no-hit run. For new players, this type of hard mode makes
the learni
ng process more frustrating if they jumped straight into it. For experienced players, the game barely changes
when you crank it up to Hard. So who is having more fun on Hard mode? Maybe someone, I guess. It’s not my cup of tea though. The fan community has filled in the gap with
self-imposed challenge runs with sequence breaking, low item runs, or restricting the
use of abilities to make the game feel different. Striking a balance between too easy and too
hard is really tough to nail. Any sequen
ce you make in a game might be off. A bit too hard in a couple places, or maybe
a little too easy. What if we could feather it just a little? Make the difficulty level… adapt? Survival Horror games are often deeply tied
to resource management and efficiency. The stuff you have on hand to defend yourself
is finite, so you have to use it wisely to survive. You could put yourself in unwinnable situations
if you were a little too trigger-happy, but most Resident Evil games keep that in mind
and have
an escape valve. Each game in the series does it a little differently,
but the games have an adaptive difficulty system to smooth things over. It keeps track of the player’s performance
through their inventory and how much damage they’ve taken and fine-tunes some things
accordingly. It influences things like item drops, enemy
strength, health or even their behavior. Enemies might move slower or perform evasive
actions at a different rate. If you’re taking a lot of hits and are very
low on heali
ng items, the game might give you some more green herbs. If you die and hit continue, enemies might
be weaker, less aggressive, or fewer in numbers. If you go a while without taking hits or if
you start taking out a bunch of enemies, the game can ramp things back up to make it more
challenging. The changes are subtle and gradual, which
stops the game from feeling like it’s patronizing the player. It’s a seamless thing that tries to keep
players from feeling like they hit a wall but also not unde
rcutting the game’s challenge
level for those who are ready for it. And if the player is really ready, the Professional
difficulty maxes out how hard the game gets and disables the system from dropping you
any lower. You chose it, you live with it. What else can we tinker with to make a game
harder? Hit points and damage feel too surface-level
- too much like adjusting a slider. What if I wanted my difficulty levels to change
game qualities? The things that are fundamental to what the
game is. I
t’s a little easier to tinker with some
of these fundamentals in a rhythm game but good on Beat Saber for letting you really
dig in. On one level, Beat Saber gives you what you’d
expect: a handful of note charts… er… box… charts per song spread over five difficulty
levels, from Easy to Expert Plus. Beat Saber’s got layers, though. You get control over some of the other variables
that give the song its character. You can turn off failure. You can remove the bombs or the flying walls
that you have
to avoid. If you’re having trouble with a routine,
hit the 30% slower option and treat it more like a practice session. If it’s too easy, try making the arrows
that tell you how to cut the boxes disappear before they reach you. Speed UP the song by a bit. Or add GHOST NOTES. I’m not gonna even tell you what that one
is, it’s too scary. There are plenty of little tweaks to add and
remove to make the song you’re playing a little easier or even a lot harder. It’s not just for pride, either. Many o
f the options change the score multiplier
up or down, which affects how many points you can get on any song. A perfect routine might not get you on the
top of the leaderboard. You might have to do it sped up with ghost
notes. With Beat Saber, there’s always a little
more challenge you can squeeze out of the system, which helps increase the longevity
of the game. If you’re allergic to nuance and think subtlety
is for cowards, you could use difficulty levels to take a hacksaw to your game’s struct
ure. The licensed SNES game Tiny Toon Adventures:
Buster Busts Loose deletes chunks of itself in its easiest mode. If you set it to ‘Children’ difficulty,
you gain an invincible dash ability and major parts that the devs thought would be hard
for kids are skipped. Sequences with instant death traps get removed. The boss fight is taken out of stage 1. There’s an auto-scroller sequence that never
appears in stage 2. The boss fight is taken out of Stage 3. ALL of stage 5 is gone, so you go from sta
ge
4 to 6 directly. The final boss, wouldn’t you know, is completely
missing. I guess it DOES make the game easier to beat
if you just remove half of it. It’s not an unworkable idea, but cutting
out big chunks of a game is a little sloppy. The point of having easier difficulties is
to let more players experience a game. Everyone seeks out different things from the
games they play, and not everyone will be looking for, in the mood for, or even ready
for a game presenting an especially tough chall
enge. But if you’re going to offer an ‘easy’
option to begin with, don’t punish players for taking it. Cuphead has two difficulty levels to select
for every boss: Simple and Regular. Simple Mode removes phases from bosses and
simplifies patterns, but it also bars you from reaching the game’s finale. Even if you finish everything on Normal, save
for one or two fights that were giving you trouble, tough luck. You’re supposed to only play the game on
Normal, I guess. The contradiction between givin
g the option
to tone it down before every boss only to punish you afterward for doing so seems unnecessary. Cuphead is tuned with its Normal difficulty
in mind. For most people, overcoming the challenge
is part of the experience. When it works, it’s very satisfying. An easy mode can undercut that satisfaction,
but not everyone playing was looking for that experience anyway. Cuphead even offers other ways to make fights
easier. Different powerups can sometimes trivialize
some challenges, especial
ly after the DLC was released, but its Simple mode is the only
fight-easyfication option that arbitrarily stops players from experiencing the whole
game. If you don’t want to provide a traditional
easy mode, that’s fine too. But if you do, don’t lock players out of
major content like the game’s finale for using the feature you put in there in the
first place. Difficulty doesn’t have to just be about
what the game IS, though. It could be about what the game asks you to
DO. Goldeneye makes great u
se of an objective
list to tweak how the game feels to play as it gets harder. The three difficulty modes - Agent, Secret
Agent, and 00 Agent - give the standard suite of health and AI behavior changes you might
expect. On Agent, guards are inaccurate and crumple
quickly. Body armor and ammo pickups are all over. Plus, you only have to check off a very short
list of objectives on the level. On Dam, just jump off the dam. Easy. Secret Agent turns up the heat with more accurate
guards and fewer pi
ckups, and makes you take out all of the level’s alarms before jumping. 00 Agent cranks enemy behavior up further,
makes you do all the previous objectives, plant a modem, AND stop by the computer room
to steal some data. And if you’re still looking for a challenge,
007 mode lets you tailor your own experience, where you can set guard health, accuracy,
and perceptiveness to levels way past even what you’d find on 00 Agent. The changing objectives force you to scour
the level and make a run in 00
Agent feel qualitatively different, especially if you
had been playing each difficulty in ascending order. Without spending a lot of time generating
new level content, new objectives can add plenty of challenge and real replayability
to a game. Platformers can have a hard time creating
a lot of difficulty levels that make sense. Challenges can make that job a little easier. To add more variety, lots of modern platformers
will have optional challenges and extra stages that stand as the thing tha
t steps it up. Think of the B-Side and C-Side levels in Celeste,
the Dark Worlds in Super Meat Boy, the post-game of Mario Odyssey, or one of my favorites,
the Death Wish DLC in A Hat in Time. These are a collection of isolated challenges
that take the game’s existing stages and bosses and ramps them all up with new level
designs, more extreme attack patterns, harsher objectives, or special stipulations that make
you rethink how to win. A stage that took place in lava will now damage
you over ti
me if you don’t cool off with buckets of water. Another time-limited stage on a train may
cut that timer way, way down. Maybe a level keeps track of an extra objective
like not getting hit, or not jumping too much. This one makes you complete a boss rush while
equipping the 1-hit-kill badge. The challenges are there to force you to explore
the limits of the game’s mechanics and find alternate strategies to get to the end. You get rewarded with cool cosmetics, but
really, the reward is the satisf
action of a job well done. If you wanted that party hat but it’s just
too hard to get, the game mercifully adds a ‘Peace and Tranquility’ accessibility
option where you enter the No Judgement Zone, pay a little money, trance out for a bit,
and the game cranks down the challenge. There you go, a frustration-free hat, if that’s
what you wanted. A Hat in Time strikes a good balance of providing
a stiff optional challenge that extends the game with tangible rewards but without getting
too hung up on
excluding anyone. Instead of a dedicated 'Hard Mode' or highly
difficult challenges, you could just provide a very high skill ceiling for players to shoot
for. You see this a lot in character action games
with ranking systems, but a handful of platformers can do it too. Like Pizza Tower. It's not that hard to finish a stage in Pizza
Tower. The game takes Wario Land inspiration in that
you can't really die, but mastering the game is a whole other story. Pizza Tower's stage structure is inspired
by the later Wario Land titles, where you venture through levels collecting items, finding
secret areas with powers, and taking out chains of enemies for points until you reach your
objective. Then it's PIZZA TIME, where you have to sprint
back to the start before time expires. If you run out of time, the villain probably
gets you, and you restart the whole stage. If you do well, you might get... like a B rank. Not bad, but not great. To get that elusive S Rank, you need to constantly
build and
maintain your combo count by taking out enemies, collecting ingredients and items,
and not getting hit. You have to study the stage and execute at
a high level. Ahh, S rank. Congrats. But is this the best you can do? Some say there's a mystical 'P-Rank,' where,
in a single run, you have to maintain a perfect combo, get EVERY major collectible, including
a secret treasure, find three hidden areas, AND transcend the need to exit properly. Instead, enter a portal and do a 2nd Lap within
the same ti
me limit. You're almost guaranteed to run out of time
and get chased down, which adds to the pressure, all while the music goes HARD in the background. To get that P-Rank, you're not just 'beating'
the stage, you're styling all over it. The stages are all intricately designed to
make that high-skill run possible while pushing players to their limits. Pizza Tower never needs to explicitly tell
you you're playing at the hardest, highest difficulty. It just makes one available to those with
the cou
rage to seek it out. So we’ve got lots of options for creating
cool difficulty levels. But there’s another catch - a lot of players
don’t really mess around much with that setting. They set it once and just go. If you’ve crafted a unique experience that
only happens in one of the modes, it can be very hard to signal to a player that changing
the difficulty from their comfort zone is worth doing. Often word of mouth will spread about what
the best difficulty is for a game but not everyone is gonn
a know about that. How can you encourage someone to explore the
different difficulties you’ve created? This one’s going to come down to building
the right incentives. Bug Fables is a spiritual successor to Paper
Mario and iterates on a lot of the core combat ideas to create a deeper combat system. The tools you have revolve around the game’s
Medal system that you can equip to give you extra bonuses and perks as you progress. It sort of resembles a deck builder with all
the viable strategies you
can discover with the medals you find. If you tack on a ‘Hard Mode’ medal, it
creates a stiffer challenge in every encounter and gives you better rewards. The best of them show up when you defeat bosses
with the Hard Mode medal equipped. You get new medals that expand the combat
system even further, letting you create all kinds of exotic new builds to try. Successful tinkering with your build lets
you tinker even more, which is exactly the kind of thing that appeals to the players
looking to wri
ng everything they can out of the game’s combat. It’s a good system, but some games can go
even further. As a roguelite, Hades is quite challenging
straight out of the gate by design. Very few players will be able to get through
a run within their first few tries. It’s meant to be chipped away at. It’s a tough game whose difficulty slowly
erodes as you get both subjectively stronger as you gain playing experience and objectively
stronger as you unlock permanent upgrades. Bit by bit, the game get
s easier and easier
until you can finally get that clearing run. But that's the structure of lots of roguelikes. That’s not that special. So once you finish a run, that's it, right? NOPE. That's just your first clear. There's way more to come. Hades is chock full of more storylines, unlockable
weapons, new upgrades, and, most importantly, the Pact of Punishment. One of the ways to get more upgrade materials
is to do incrementally more challenging runs via the Pact - a list of difficulty modifier
s
that grant 1 to 4 points of 'heat' each. The more clears you get with a specific weapon
type, the higher the heat requirement gets. There's a wide variety of modifiers like making
enemies stronger and faster, adding a time limit for each region, making traps and lava
hurt you 4 times as much, giving armored enemies an extra buff, forcing players to sacrifice
one of their boons in each region, limiting your upgrade options, taking away permanent
passive buffs, or even 'Extreme Measures,' which
completely changes the game's four main
boss encounters to something new. You don't have to push the system to its extremes
to get the upgrades you want. You'll be able to get through a ton of runs
with pretty low heat levels and easy modifiers. But if you're feeling it, you can crank it
way up and give a personalized ultimate challenge that shows off the combat system's depth and
forces you to strategize carefully to succeed. The Pact of Punishment is a brilliant way
to extend the life of Hades
through tweaking its difficulty in ways that only seasoned
players might appreciate, acting as a reward, a challenge, inspiration, and a life-extender. It encourages you to branch out of what you
think your comfort zone is to really explore the depth the game has to offer, all while
giving such a fine-grained difficulty-tuning mechanism that the game stays at exactly your
personal sweet spot for way longer than you might expect. Letting players gain better rewards for taking
on greater risk is
a classic way to encourage them to step out of their comfort zone. It’s great. IF it works. It doesn’t always work. This type of system has to support the player’s
sense of control over their situation. In the early 2010s, Sakurai and his team added
an intensity slider to Kid Icarus Uprising and Smash 4. Kid Icarus lets you, for a price, set the
‘intensity’ of a stage on a scale of 0 to 9. Higher numbers would up the difficulty, adding
more and stronger enemies and rewarding you with extra money
and weapon drops if you could
persevere. If you can’t, though, not only do you lose
out on some of those rewards, but the intensity level decreases automatically. The game also had ‘intensity gates’ that
were open only if you played above that number. The gates held bonus fights with slightly
tougher enemy encounters that paid you in extra weapons for completing them. If you lost either before or during one of
these gate encounters, the lowered intensity could lock you out of retrying these alt
ogether. Normally, automatically reducing the difficulty
level for a player who is repeatedly dying can feel patronizing, but in Kid Icarus, this
system created a strong risk-reward element that really upped the tension for some of
the harder fights in the game. The same idea was brought over to Smash Wii
U and 3DS’ Classic modes, though they had to contend with some new problems. The broad risk-reward elements of the system
are the same, but the way Smash increased the challenge is less great.
Not only would you have to fight stronger
and smarter CPU enemies based on the intensity, but the game often forced you into group battles
with up to 8 opponents at once, random stages, random items, and random objectives. The sheer chaos of those fights might be fun
in isolation, but when you have so much on the line, the luck-based elements undercut
the system, making it feel more cheap than challenging. If you lost, your intensity level would drop,
and the final boss might not even go through
all of its unique phases. Losing out on some rewards is fair enough
but getting locked out of a final boss phase just because some random bot got some free
kills on you with the game’s ridiculously overpowered items is more frustrating than
fun. It always feels better if the player is in
control of how risky the risk is. Dynamic difficulty systems work best when
the change in difficulty is based on your performance rather than how lucky you get
on any run. Welp, I’ve increased the longevity of
this
video enough for one day. Head to the comments and let’s talk about
your crowning achievements in some tough games, and what you had to go through to get it done. I wonder if anyone’s gonna notice that we
didn’t talk about Dark Souls at all in a video about difficulty options. Probably not. I’m also happy to announce that we’ve
added some new content over at our Patreon, so head over there to get access to early
release main channel videos, our behind-the-scenes podcast, topic polls, the ne
w newsletter,
and other perks. Difficulty options can be so much more than
tweaking numbers. They can demand more from players and alter
the fabric of a game. A great difficulty option system accommodates
all kinds of player skills, wants, and needs, and is the secret that helps the most people
have the best time. *chill vibes outro from Kid Icarus Uprising*
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