Comments on: 2 Unspoken Methods For Creating Difficulty Levels

By: Robert Dowling

Robert Dowling — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 01:57:25 +0000

I’ve added a difficulty option to my game and named them as:
“easy – for a more casual play”
“normal – everything is as it should be”
The difficulty effects combat only.

You need to go into settings to change it, but it can be changed during gameplay (just taking you back to the last checkpoint)

Easy adjusts each type of enemy a little differently: Some have weaker attacks while others have weaker defence.

By: merc-ai

merc-ai — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 13:57:13 +0000

Fallout and Baldur’s Gate had adjustable difficulty levels.
So it’s definitely a viable option.

Some games, like original System Shock, gave the ability to choose your own set before game start: you could make combat hard and puzzles easy, for example, or some other combination.

But my favorite is the approach from Thief. Apart from clever level naming (iirc, Normal, Expert and Master difficulties) and classic modifiers (player health, damage dealt/received etc) it changed the mission objects and the layout of mission.
Example: in mission 2 on Normal, you could use an elevator to get from mines to the prison. On Expert+, the elevator was broken, so you’d have to crawl through undead-infested mines.

By: Fili

Fili — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:25:46 +0000

You forgot one of the most important things: CHEATS! There are times when I’m playing a game just like you (for story and graphics) and I get stuck somewhere. I’d rather use some cheats just to get past that BOSS/door/bug than switching to a lower difficulty level or waiting for the game to feel sorry for me and drop me another booster pack.
Oh, and I don’t agree with naming the easiest level “PRO”. It’s stupid. Remember Wolfenstein 3D? When selecting the difficulty, if you chose easy, it had a baby picture.
I did the thing with choosing the difficulty level any time and nobody used it. Most people don’t even think that there’s an option for that so they don’t look for it.

By: lonestarr

lonestarr — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 23:26:08 +0000

In the God of War series, when you fail several times at the same point (say 10 or so), the game propose you to switch to easy mode. I *never* choose “yes” for 3 reasons:
1) it’s an insult to my ego (just like someone looks at me playing and say: “it’s too hard for you baby”).
2) it seems to be a one-way switch: once you’re in easy mode, I think you can’t go back to normal mode.
3) I know some achievements and extra challenges can’t be unlocked if you don’t finish the game in normal mode.

So I definitely hate such proposal from a game since you don’t know what you “loose” once you have switched (even temporarily) to easy mode. IMHO, the best way to handle difficulty in game-design is always to offer an alternate road for hard levels (ie: hard!=blocking) and inform the player what he will not get if he bypasses it (ie: hard==reward).