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| 09.19.2004Regarding Videogame Difficulty Levels
Easy, standard, hard, harder, hardest... when I’m sitting down at my computer with a new video game, staring at the game options screen, the above words often leave me wondering how game difficulty levels are really designed.
Every time I select my difficulty level, I wonder if the developers of the game have once again failed to take advantage of how many difficulty levels they’ve included in their own game. Let me make what I mean clear; in most games these days the first difficulty level is 'easy', and appropriately, it’s very easy. The enemies do far less damage, the AI is toned down to make them less aggressive, and it generally gives players an opportunity to learn the game and get used to how it plays.
Quite often, the game's 'standard' setting is where things start to go wrong, in my opinion. In my mind, when easy is an opponent that hardly fights back and lets you learn the game; standard should be a difficulty level where the enemy mounts more assaults, does normal damage and generally puts up a fight.
The problem I can’t seem to understand is why games with 4 or 5 or 6 difficulty levels progress immediately from an 'easy' AI that lays down and dies to a 'standard' AI that assaults so furiously that you can’t figure out why there’s a 'hard'. In general, real time strategy games seem to fall victim to this problem most often.
The latest game to fall victim to this skewed progression of difficulty levels is Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War. As my roommate and I sat down and let the demo install, we were very excited; designer diaries and preview videos had show this game to be one of the best representation of the Warhammer universe we had ever seen. We are both enthusiasts of tabletop gaming, and everything we had seen up to that point led us to believe this would be a terrific game. Since my roommate had the faster computer, he took the first crack at the game. Everything seemed wonderful as he played through the tutorial and learned his way around the interface. The graphics and overall design of the game came across beautifully. Once the tutorial was finished my roommate started up a game against one easy opponent, taking note that the game had five difficulty levels. The easy opponent proved to be what one would expect... easy.
The problem came a little later when we tried to play a game on the standard difficulty setting. After only a few short moments, the enemy had their first assault group moving into our base, then another, and another, and another. The relentless and very fast AI has so far defied defeat after several days of playing, even though both of us are experienced gamers.
I don’t understand why developers don’t make their standard or moderate opponents a challenge, but one that can be overcome without too great an effort, and save hard, harder and hardest for people that want the more extreme challenge. I understand that gamers have an enormous variety of skill levels, and it’s very hard to judge a medium skill level of all gamers to set your standards. But, for pity’s sake, err on the side of caution. If you’re going to have 5 difficulty levels, then use them.
As a solution, game developers could look for ways that would allow the players to customize difficulty levels to their own liking. In a great many video games, the perfect difficulty level is only a hair's breadth away from one that the developers have included in the game. The more customizable the difficulty, the broader an audience the game will be able to appeal to for the longest amount of time.
The video game industry is in a constant state of change. The progress of technology constantly changes the development process. But the technology needed to see this kind of problem fade into history are already here. Game developers have long allowed users to edit .ini files to alter how a game performs. I hope the future brings more transparent AI allowing the end users to customize their difficulty levels, and make their video game experience the best it can possibly be.-Anthony Petruccione
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Letters to the Editor
