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Analysis: Designing Games To Challenge Diverse Players
by Soren Johnson [PC, Console/PC, Exclusive]
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April 5, 2010
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[In this design analysis, originally published in Game Developer magazine, Spore/Civilization IV designer & programmer Soren Johnson looks at designing varied difficulty, presenting examples from Oblivion and DotA to BioShock to see where some succeed -- and others notably fail.]
The surgery game Trauma Center was one of the earliest examples of how the Nintendo DS could change our industry. By turning the stylus into a scalpel, the designers let players immerse themselves into the role of a doctor as never before.
Unfortunately, the game simulated the pressures of actual surgery as well by presenting staggeringly difficult, time-pressured levels. Failure blocked the player’s progress, which proved to be a fatal flaw for the game because there were no difficulty levels at all -- no way for the player to decide what level of challenge was appropriate.
Considering the wide demographic of gamers today, from young children to seniors, this decision doomed the game to a tiny slice of the DS’s audience.
Challenge has always been a core component of game design. However, after video games left the arcades -– in which quick difficulty ramps were a necessity of doing business –- most designers realized that their games could appeal to more people if they tailored the challenge to meet the needs of the individual user.
Dynamic Difficulty
Call of Duty 4, for example, measures the player’s performance during the training level to suggest an appropriate difficulty level. Other games – such as Left 4 Dead – have developed dynamic difficulty algorithms which adjust enemy spawns and health drops to the player’s current situation and demonstrated skill.
However, dynamic difficulty can be a tricky proposition as –- similarly to AI cheating –- if the player can see the invisible hand controlling the challenge, the spell is broken. Players need to perceive that they are improving against a fixed measuring stick. The RPG Oblivion turned off many people by scaling the weapons and skills of enemies directly in relation to the player character’s level.
Once this mechanic became obvious, many absurd strategies emerged, such as never leveling up to ensure that enemies always stayed weak. More significantly, this dynamic ruined one of the core features of an RPG: power progression. After developing advanced characters, players enjoy easily brushing aside monsters which earlier in the game could have destroyed them.
Elective Difficulty
Indeed, the core mechanic of RPGs -– that the player character grows slowly in power after each successful battle –- can be seen as a way to give players the ability to adjust the game’s difficulty themselves.
Gamers who feel comfortable with the combat system can push ahead through levels at the edge of their abilities while players who prefer a more comfortable experience can grind their way to overpowered characters before proceeding. Most importantly, this system puts the player in control, not the designer.
Although selecting a difficulty level at start was a simple, early innovation, only recently have games allowed players to switch between them during normal play. On every third death in Ninja Gaiden Black, players could elect to drop to “Ninja Dog” mode, which weakened enemies but also forced Ryu to wear pink ribbons as punishment. This mechanic – minus the mockery – was quickly adopted by other games, such as God of War.
Indeed, elective difficulty itself can be a core gameplay mechanic. The browser-based Desktop Tower Defense has no difficulty levels at all but does allow the player to speed up the game (and thereby increase the challenge) by triggering attack waves prematurely. Then, the final score is calculated from not just how many enemies were destroyed but also from how quickly the game finished.
Therefore, beating DTD on the default speed is just the beginning. as players must learn how to master the speed-up mechanic to start improving their scores.
Orthogonal Challenges
Similarly, Thief determines the difficulty mode not at the beginning of a level but by how the player challenges herself during the level. The requirements of Easy may only be stealing a certain number of jewels and artifacts while Hard also necessitates finishing the level without killing a single guard.
These different modes suggest orthogonal challenges within the same game, a smart way to extend a game’s life for the hard-core. Other official examples include the One-City Challenge and Always War options in Civilization 4 and the Hardcore mode (with permanent death) in Diablo 2.
Indeed, Xbox Live Achievements provide a fantastic infrastructure for adding new challenges via unorthodox goals to games that might otherwise no longer interest core gamers.
Furthermore, other settings can adjust the challenge of a game without changing the difficulty, per se. For example, StarCraft had both a difficulty setting and a speed setting, so a player could try a more difficult AI but at a slower speed if he did not enjoy time pressure. One sadly forgotten setting is the complexity option that appeared in earlier games, such as M.U.L.E. and Lords of Conquest. This option provided a simpler version of the game – with less types of resources, for example – but still with a fully-capable AI that could provide a challenge for new players.
Challenge and Punishment
However, some games choose to punish players on top of giving them a fair challenge. Games without generous save systems, for instance, are vulnerable to being ruined by challenging sub-sections, which might require multiple attempts to pass. If a player needs to repeat a lengthy but easy section (or, more shamefully, a non-skippable cut-scene) before getting to the difficult bit, the game is punishing the player instead of challenging him.
One of the most elegant solutions to this problem was the time control mechanic in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, in which the player is able to rewind past mistakes a limited number of times to try again. This system reduced the overhead of repeating a difficult jump to a relative minimum while still retaining tension because of the finite number of rewinds.
Another example of reducing punishment can be seen in the history of MMO’s. World of Warcraft famously reduced the penalty for death found in its predecessors, such as Everquest and Ultima Online. By removing corpse runs and experience loss, WoW enabled people to play the game they way they wanted to play it.
Instead of only attacking easy monsters which would never cause the loss of experience or loot, players could attempt a difficult battle knowing that, in the worst case, they would be warped back to a safe location.
Thus, games with severe penalties for failure can actually warp the core gameplay by strongly encouraging players to always choose the safe route. Defense of the Ancients, the popular mod for Warcraft 3, rewards the opposite team with gold every time a player is killed, which makes bumbling new players extremely unpopular with their teammates.
This simple dynamic makes the DotA community notoriously nasty and unpleasant, even by the meager standards of the Internet.
After Punishment
The strategy/puzzle hybrid Puzzle Quest took WoW’s forgiving nature to the logical extreme by removing all forms of punishment from the game entirely. Players are even rewarded for losing battles, albeit much less than they would be for winning them.
In fact, this mechanic has an interesting side benefit; Puzzle Quest has no need for a visible save system. Because players are never penalized in any way, the game can comfortably auto-save after every battle or action, knowing that a player will never feel the need to revert to an earlier save.
Such a forgiving system is not for every game. BioShock used a similar mechanic by respawning dead players for free in Vita-Chambers placed throughout the game. Furthermore, enemies health rates were not reset on a player respawn, which meant that the player could chip away at any enemy with any weapon, including the wrench, if she was willing to die and be reborn enough times. This feature felt like an exploit to enough players that Irrational eventually patched in an option to disable Vita-Chambers.
However, the problem may have been with the expectations of BioShock’s intended audience instead of any fundamental flaw with the respawn mechanic. Lego Star Wars uses an identical mechanic, which is perfect for the target audience of a dad and a son playing together in a forgiving environment. For BioShock, core gamers expected the game to force them to use advanced strategies to progress instead of an easy out.
Perhaps the best solution is to always allow players to progress but to rate their performance against some constant metric. Elite Beat Agents hands out letter grades of S, A, B, C, and D for each song performance based on the player’s timing. The game continues as long as the player finishes the song, but few will not want to go back to try and improve.
If Trauma Center had only adopted such a simple system, the game may have become more than just an interesting footnote. Designers should take care not to head down the same dead-end.
[This column originally appeared in the December 2009 issue of Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine - if you enjoyed it, consider getting a physical or digital subscription for access to many more columns and articles not available online.]
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Difficulty I feel is only part of the problem, a lot of times it's getting players to understand how the game is played. A good example is Blaz Blue - while not a new genre or play style, this 2D fighter had great tutorials, above the status quo for the genre, and mapped advanced moves to the R control stick so inexperienced players can fight against seasoned ones on more of an even field. One of my favorite games/series Disgaea, has a steep learning curve, and more than one person I have reccommended this game to has given up due to a lack of understanding of the genre. Better tutorials would have made this game more accessible without having to change the overall difficulty.
Some people complained about the life chambers in Bioshock, but I found such complaints odd because the game design places the decision where it should be: in the player's hands. I solved the game a couple times, including max difficulty, and never used the life chambers at all. I chose not to do so, that's all.
The mistake that many designers make is to attempt to force their view of how the game should be played onto the player. As a player, I couldn't care less how the designer chooses to play the game because I will play in a way that is enjoyable to me... unless the poor design does not allow me to do so, of course.
I would argue that Trauma Center is far more than a footnote for the DS and Wii, and for the industry as a whole. Yes, it has a high difficulty, but so does Civilization, albeit for differing reasons. Civilization is simply far too steep of a learning curve for many potential players no matter what difficulty level of play is chosen. This not poor design, though, because the game is intended to be a historical simulator, and the history of human social and technological evolution is a rather complex area of study. Likewise, Trauma Center offers a simulation of surgery. Both games simplify their subject matter in many ways, but both games are still difficult for a "casual" sort of player who just wants a quick jolt of entertainment. There's nothing wrong with this approach, either, because there are always other games to play that offer quick entertainment rather than deep involvement.
Difficulty is a rather subjective concept. Some people get a game, play through it and return it within a few days or perhaps a week, claiming they "solved" it. In many cases, this is pure nonsense. For example, Star Ocean was returned to a local GameStop less than a week after it came out for the PS3. I guarantee that the player who returned it and claimed to have solved it did no such thing, at least as far as seeing all of the game's content. The player may have reached an ending, of course, and may even have unlocked all the character endings on a single play thru (unlikely without a guide). However, the game has content that cannot be accessed in one play thru, and each of the nine characters have 100 battle trophies. That's not even including the many achievements. Granted, it's a matter of semantics, but "solving" by simply "reaching an ending" seems to be a very simplistic interpretation of how to define "solving" a game. This is what I mean by difficulty being subjective. It isn't something that a designers can define for the players of their games.
I've noticed that with "casual gamers", game complexity is more of an issue than difficulty. For comparison, Flash games are usually very simple, but difficult. Whereas PC RTSs are very complex, but not difficult (on the default difficulty setting). As a result "casual gamers" can pick up Flash games much faster than RTSs (plus, Flash games are much, much more accessible to casual gamers). My fiance is very much a casual gamer, but she can top my high scores on various games on kongregate.com due to the fact that she likes to play them and plays them more often; she is capable of accomplishing things I cannot do on those games despite my relatively "hardcore" status.
Then on the other curve you have the Marks, the bounty board that posts really difficult monsters you can only encounter if you've accepted the contract. These guys are often tuned to be pretty challenging to very challenging, and in some cases, not meant to be tackled at your level. (Though I can attest, it is possible to kill every Mark as soon as you get the contract, some are just tough as nails.)
You get to choose to fight Marks, aside from the first one, you're never required to fight another one again. I know a few people who felt the Marks were too hard, so they just kept with the story and never fought them. I know a few people who felt they were too hard, fought some and saved some for later. Of all the people I have discussed FFXII with, none were as adamant as I was, peeling from the story every time a new contract became available and doggedly pursuing it until it was defeated. Sure, the story was trivial after hunting marks, but that is kind of the point, it was much, much more difficult - and I loved every minute of it.
One could be found when starting a game of the original System Shock. As part of the game-start sequence, players could choose from four levels of difficulty in four different aspects of the game: enemies, puzzles, story, and cyberspace.
This allowed players a remarkable amount of latitude in how the game played. If you wanted a thoughtful game, you could turn enemies and cyberspace down to 1, puzzles up to 4, and story up to 3 (a story level of 4 imposed a “race against time” mode). If you preferred a more action-oriented play experience, you could turn enemies and cyberspace up to 4, puzzles down to 1, and story either down to 1 or up to 4.
Another interesting example of challenge design is the approach of providing greater rewards to players who successfully take greater but optional risks. In the original Star Wars: Dark Forces, no ability to save during levels was offered -- if you died, you went back to the start of the level. In the superb sequel, Dark Forces: Jedi Knight, the developers clearly wanted to preserve this kind of challenge but without imposing the harsh restart-the-level penalty.
Their solution was a form of what Ed calls “opt-in difficulty”: the number of Force stars awarded at the end of a level (which could be spent on Force powers) was maximized if you never reloaded your game while playing that level. If you wanted to reload, you could, and you’d still be rewarded -- but for those who wanted a harder challenge, it was optionally available and it generated a better reward. I’ve always thought this was an extremely elegant solution.
Personally, I suspect that dynamic difficulty is the future. I fully expect that a version of Left 4 Dead’s AI Director will be included in Half-Life 2: Episode 3, but we’ll see.
The question not being asked here is whether or not detailed customization of difficulty is something that should be pursued in an honest game. It reminds me of the feeling you get once you learn the cheat codes and how cheap victory feels once you use them. Another example would be how you feel after buying a much longed-for CD compared to how you feel once you discover BitTorrent. Suddenly being overwhelmed by everything the game has to offer isn't exactly the same as pouring every fiber of yourself into overcoming the next obstacle. In the end you're just looking at data files, but the path is important. In life there's a direct relationship between the hardship of the journey and the reward of success.
In that spirit I suggest that if difficulty levels are used, they be clearly defined from the beginning so players know what they should expect, and the the reward should be commensurate with the accomplishment so everyone knows their place.
While it's true that the game didn't scale enemies or anything based on the difficulty, the player actually DID have to choose a difficulty before entering a level, which changed the victory conditions.
This is an important difference - I was much more likely to pick a higher difficulty at the menu than I would be to slog through a level I've already met the victory conditions for just to earn a higher difficulty.
I grew up not beating games I owned until years later, thanks to the lack of saving. And those games game me years of gameplay, because I would let a game cool down when I lost, then eventually psyche myself up, get back in the saddle, and earn an emotional attachment to my success. Playing later levels in those games was intense, with so much at stake...
Hooking a player, making them want to become a better player, and making a game good enough that a player actually wants to spend the time mastering it, all while making the barrier to entry almost non existent....
Is this a lost art?