Hi Tom. The original X-COM (X-COM: UFO Defense / UFO: Enemy Unknown) had an adaptive difficulty system. I put it in because we were 2 months from release, without a hope in hell of testing the game balance from beginning to end on each difficulty setting (we were still making lots of changes and additions to the game). I think the game may not have done so well without it. I am not sure if any players realised what was going on and tried to game the system. It tended to adapt difficulty upwards, but not downwards, so gaming the system wasn't really effective. You could argue it helped to make the game too punishing though.
I think it fits the athmosphere. Wether you are winning or losing you are heroic in your efforts against the alien. And when you start curbstomping the aliens they will show you your place. Thank you for making that game. It is awesome to this day even if it was made before I was born.
I have to say, that when I discovered the "Turn Off Permadeath" option I was over the moon happy. The difficulty is excellent, and losing characters had good weight to it. But, letting players enjoy the game by saying "You don't want to lose the character? That's fine, then, don't lose the character!" is a very nice touch that just helps us keep characters we want to live, alive. I'd put it in a class of respecting the player's fun.
I think my issue in most of these cases is actually linearity. That is my single biggest problem with roguelikes. While the procgen does alter the experience, most of them are still about replaying the same content in mostly the same order. To me, this always feels like punishment, and the result is that I stop playing if I die a lot. On the other hand, if the game is totally non-linear, I'm much more likely to accept a high difficulty because I can always do something new. Caves of Qud is very difficult and as perma-death, but if I start a new character, I can venture off in a different direction because there's a whole world to explore. And of course the crowning example to me would be Dwarf Fortress, where any amount of failure can still feel like a part of a single progressing story.
The problem with the highscore system is that you can't hit that peak consistently. There's never a lengthy flow state, only a few rounds or so before the game finally kicks you back down to *the beginning of the game.* Unless you're good enough to get a *really* high score, the game makes you replay super easy levels and you never got anything out of the farther levels besides the skills that let you make more of the game easy. Heat Signature helps this by letting you choose the difficulty, so a player like myself will never touch easy or hard missions because they aren't fun anymore.
I think adaptive difficulty, as you said, doesn't really work for big, linear games. However it can work really well in match-based scenarios, essentially mimicking an Elo ladder you'd find in multiplayer games. Notable examples: Auro, Minos Strategos, Really Bad Chess.
I personally kind of hate roguelikes, because nothing has really stopped me from seeing 'winning' as a success, and dying at any point before then being failure. Failure cannot be followed up with practice or repetition or a change of strategy until I eventually succeed. I failed the run, and there's just nothing that can be done about that. The heavy random factor tends to only compound on the frustration, because runs can completely randomly be very very hard, or very very easy, based on which upgrades the game chooses to give you. In some games, the upgrades can even be detrimental (as the Tiny Planet can be in Binding of Isaac), only making the RNG factor heavier. The only roguelike I've ever particularly liked is Crypt of the Necrodancer, which is absolutely random, but is designed such that you can beat it without any upgrades at all. Even if you never get any healing items ever, which is almost impossible, nearly all enemy attack patterns are extremely deterministic. If you get hit, it is absolutely your fault, be it a mistake you made one move ago or 10 moves ago. Further, you can practice every single enemy and boss as much as you want with any weapon in the game in a safe environment, if you don't understand any aspect of the game. The challenge comes in the rather lightly random enemy compositions, and trying to unravel them, as well as trying to go for high speed or high scores. So.. hey, go figure, difficulty is random, I guess? Difficulty is random, and having the extra layers of random on top of already random difficulty drives me absolutely insane. Give me a way to practice all the content in a relatively safe environment over an easy mode or infinite replayability any day.
Probably the most maddening game I've experienced this in isn't actually Binding of Isaac, but rather Enter the Gungeon, which has a pretty long death animation compared to most roguelikes. Legitimately, if I could skip it, I'd have probably kept playing, because the core gameplay is actually fun enough that I didn't mind the layers of luck, or lack of a practice mode. The problem is, if you're dying relatively frequently within the first few floors, you get to see the death animation more often, and a much larger percentage of time spent playing the game is spent waiting for the death animation. I'm well aware that it's significant to the story and actually means something really cool and uplifting, and I don't care, I want to play the video game. For a stretch of time, I actually pretended I had 1 hit less and just hit quick restart from the menu when I got 1 hit away from death, because that was a lot less frustrating.
Roguelikes' having a good difficulty system is useless if you just hate the genre. For example, I, like you Tom, hate repetition (having to go through the same section of the game again), but unlike you, I see starting over in roguelikes as repetition, and so I've been unable to play any of them more than 2-3 hours (Spelunky has zero appeal to me, but Into the Breach doesn't fall into this category).
You pretty much describe AI War when talking about adaptive difficulty. Its a space-RTS where you control a small, underdog force against massively more powerful AI overlords. The better you do the more seriously they take you, and you can be crushed if you aggravate them too early, so you have to 'game' how well you are doing. Its a pretty well-liked game, though I've never really been able to get into it.
It's more about actually capturing territory rather than just doing well. A part of doing well involves knowing when to not capture territory, or what to destroy to make a world as nonthreatening as possible to 'secure land' without actually making the AI mad. I suppose that's all stuff that goes into gaming the system though, now, isn't it?
That's strange... either *You* or YT deleted my comment (and reset the thumbs down counter: it was at 4, now it's showing at 1 "mine"). I hope it wasn't you (fair and critical criticism is a good thing). - I'm not rewriting my long comment... - basically I disagree with what you're saying in this video; I think you're leaning too hard on Roguelikes and games with permadeath, because they fit your "theory" about difficulty systems in games requiring that they be accepted/enjoyed by the population/community that plays video games (this is a false assertion because there are people who choose not to play those style/genre of games for the specific reason that they have that kind of difficulty system) so your "theory of everything" as it pertains to "difficulty systems" in video games isn't all encompassing - a difficulty system should provide an enjoyable experience; all game mechanics/systems factor into the end result - some games/designers do a poor job of combining mechanics. - If I find out later that this comment too has been deleted: then I'm out! (^_^)b no point in wasting your time trying to be apart of something when you can't participate.
A training level like the one in COD4 alleviates the problem with a set of static difficulty settings ie easy, normal, and hard. Adaptive difficulty can be represented with a set of challenges where every successive challenge is more difficult than the previous one. This can constitute the training level that gives the player a recommended difficulty setting.
"Carrot on a stick" point based upgrade systems. Instead of being a system that exclusively lets players make the game easier, let players spend their "upgrade" points in aspects they think could be more challenging. This way, by the end of the game the player has tuned it to be exactly what they'd want.
I pretty much agree with this video's predecessor, difficulty is random in the same way personality is random. Unless you play games with the explicit intention of improving and learning from every mistake then a game's difficulty becomes essentially luck in whether you approach the game in the way the developer intends or not. The score-based self challenge system you proposed isn't an idea I find remotely appealing. It is functionally the same as the player choice difficulty system that you said didn't really work. For increased rewards (better gear, a higher score) a player can choose to undergo a greater challenge. Receiving a higher number rather than a mechanical reward does not make the system's effect on the player any different. Really, score systems are difficulty agnostic anyways. High scores cannot "fix" the difficulty problem, as they are only a way of quantifying a player's performance. You proposed (in the admittedly very specific instance of a game which goes on forever) that high scores will allow a player to reach his limits. But doesn't the game itself still need to have a difficulty progression? Pac-man, for example, becomes mechanically more difficult as the game goes on. Pac-Man's speed, his speed while eating dots, the ghost's speed, the point at which the ghosts increase in speed, Pac-Mans's speed while hungry- these are what determine difficulty, and these are what change as the game goes on. Unless I fundamentally misunderstood what you meant, I can't see how presence of scores changes the discussion of difficulty at all. Honestly "difficulty" is a fairly nebulous term anyways, but I don't want this comment to lose any more focus than it already has.
Difficulty is about challenge. The point of difficulty is to give high skill players a challenging game, while making sure low skill players don't get overwhelmed. Challenge is a meaningful goal that put your skill to the test. A personal high score serves as a meaningful goal, and the nature of high scores ensures the goal is hard enough that your skill will be tested.
I recently played Bastion from Supergiant Games and they have a "betting system" with their "shrines". I started to hate the betting system a little bit because some areas were WAY more difficult with certain shrines, and I thought to myself "Gee, this seems kind of lazy. I really appreciate it when developers take the proper time to balance their game." I still love the game, but I had no idea that it was THAT difficult to balance a game. Great videos, thanks for the insight :)
Bitmap Brother's GODS was doing some adaptive difficulty that didn't punish really good players. It was simple and was based just on life-saving rewards. On the one hand, it was rewarding with extra lives people who fail to play well ("Help Bonus from the Gods" which was literally a life saver and in such a deadly environment it didn't seem humiliating). On the other hand, it rewarded people who play REALLY well ("High Score and High Lives reward").
Obligatory comment that Factorio is great with its difficulty system since the complexity is proportional to how far into the game you are. In addition, pollution plays an interesting role in that building really quickly large scale draws the attention of the biters quicker.
I find the differentiation between high score and adaptive difficulty interesting, because it's obvious what you mean, and yet: a high score kind of is an adaptive difficulty. Its just mapped to a linear sequence of objectives, so it doesnt try to figure out where the player is at, but just treats each milestone as grounds for the next part of the game where the difficulty increases. The difference with this is that the motivation for the player is inextricable from the measure of difficulty. This also means it's always predictable for a player: they can learn how the games difficulty ramps up. Getting over it is a game with no explicit high score, but the distance you cover is the intrinsic reward. To play that game is to care about getting up the mountain. High level players speed run it, and while not every mechanic scales well with the question of "how fast can you complete this challenge", I find it interesting that games of timing and tactile motion dont lean into speed more. I find spelunkyfar more interesting at high speed than with efficient point acquisition.
I'd like to say one thing in defense of choose your own difficulty though, so long as i can change my choice at any time. I think it's very useful in long games, especially if there's a linear story or quest where failing a specific challenge can block my progress. I play games like the witcher 3 on hard so i need to engage with the systems a bit more, but when there is a subjectively difficult or frustrating bit that i fail and don't find it interesting to try again, i just bump the difficulty all the way down to get through it, and then back up. You could say it's a failure of the game's design that i need to do that, but these giant games are never really balanced, and are a buffet of different things some of which i enjoy the challenge of more than others. People will get stuck in places, and if you don't let them through many of them will just abandon the game and go play something else. Another great tool in my opinion are optional challenges, and the ability to try again later and go do something else. I managed to finish Hollow Knight, but to do that i did not need to defeat the hardest bosses or the toughest platforming: most of the hardest bits of the game are optional. I still feel that i had a great time and finished the game.
I wonder if there are any games that say that you can choose a difficulty level, but don't change anything to the game. And if so, how did players handle that?
There's a game called God Hand where enemies become more challenging by changing their attack patterns and and introducing new moves as you level up. I understand that this is different as it's related to player progression, but in my head I'm imagining that a player can select the enemy's initial "competence". Of course this leads to problems where players who choose more "competent" enemies see less variance in enemy behavior if the moves and attack patterns are hard coded. I think if you can script the moves separately then you can have enemies with attack patterns that piece together moves that matches the player's level.
A game which difficulty system I really dislike is Dead Cells. It started out as a fun game, but through intentional nerfs and removal of noob-friendly builds, the game has reached a point where its final level on the max difficulty level has only been reached by >1% of its playerbase. I feel that games like Dark Souls do it well, because the player can use builds that make them more survivable, or they can use summons, in a sense creating a player-adaptive difficulty, where the player has the ability to make the game easier for themselves.
Maybe have players go through a trial run of your game set at normal by default and then ask them after the mission or level is over if they want to make it easier or harder.
Since comments are disabled in your information games ramble video, I am going to recommend you here Outer Wilds. It's not a pure information game, by your definition, but it gets close.
I still think the best difficulty system is giving the player no choices and making a hard game that takes practice to master. Like the old NES games. The easy med hard systems don’t work the best as you mentioned and adaptive is just too hard to get right and they just make you never be your best because you’re really just being handicapped the whole way with light bumps up or down in difficulty.
I always like dishonoreds take on difficulty. I know that some devs intend the player to have a specific experience, but i always felt like dishonored should be played howver u like it. So if i want feel like an insane god killing guards i can do so, and if i want a realy challenge and stirll complete the game nonlethal-and unspotted thats up to me. yes u can make the game very very easy and for a new player the hardest dissiculty will be almost impossible but it sup to the player. So I think this kind of difficulty system works really great.
Honestly, thank you for making these videos. I've been wanting to make my own games for a while and I'm tired of all the tutorials and talks by people who've never made a game (not that those videos aren't useful, they're still often good to reference as well). Also thank you for all the work you put into Gunpoint and Heat Signature man, they're just great.
