Difficulty in Videogames

 I hate difficulty modes! I understand why they exist; publishers are scared that games which are hard will scare off potential players, and the game's sales will be hindered. So why not just make things easy? Well, sometimes developers do just that and make the game stupidly easy. But, for most players, an easy mode will not let them push their skills to the limit. What most developers are striving for is a balance between challenge and enjoyment. But where does that balance lie? Will it depend on the developer, you ask? Bethesda’s Todd Howard and FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki will give you drastically different answers. 

Difficulty Should Match The Game’s Emotion

DOOM Eternal (id Software)

However, regardless of the game's difficulty, all games should have their difficulty matching the emotion they’re trying to convey. Ludonarrative dissonance is a term which gets thrown around a lot in the gaming industry. It simply means the conflict in tone between a videogame's story and its gameplay. It can be used to describe both when there is virtually no conflict, like with the original Bioshock, and when there is a lot of conflict, with the most popular example being the Uncharted series, where you play as a sarcastic and quippy protagonist, who also happens to slaughter thousands of people who get in the way of him and the treasure.

Another great example of this is in Watch Dogs 2, where you play as Marcus Holloway, a nerdy and snarky hacker who makes jokes and light-hearted mockery of the situations he’s in while at the same time killing dozens of people just so he can hack into a Silicon Valley tech company, or infiltrate a knockoff Scientology megachurch. I would say that the ludonarrative dissonance in Watch Dogs 2 is even worse than it is in Uncharted since you're not just killing trained mercenaries who signed up for danger, but rather security guards who could be working to support their family and San Francisco police who – as far as American police departments go – are generally well respected. It even got so bad to the point where I forced myself into playing as a pacifist, where the only weapon I would use was the stun gun and electric hacks; otherwise, the gameplay felt too detached from the tone that Watch Dogs 2 was trying to go for. And I honestly think the game would have been better off just being completely non-lethal and simply developing systems for that playstyle to thrive in, rather than adding lethal guns and explosions into them simply because the first game had them. The first game had a drastically different tone, with a drastically different character, where you could actually see Aiden Pearce killing as something which is not brought up to so many questions. However, the same cannot be said about Marcus, who is constantly making jokes as he’s killing people. It just makes him seem like a deranged psychopath who takes selfies of the mass murders that he committed. 

But I’ll leave ludonarrative dissonance at that. Instead, I want to talk about how ludonarrative dissonance can also be applied to a game’s difficulty. For example, in DOOM Eternal, you play as a demon-slaying one-man army fighting against the forces of hell itself. You are the ultimate underdog. With this in mind, many people think that the most “accurate” difficulty would be “I’m Too Young To Die '', where you have lots of health, enemies do little damage, and you kill everything with one punch. But that would be misinterpreting the emotion that the game’s trying to convey. 

Sure, the Doomguy is strong, but he’s not a god; he’s just a super jacked guy who got demon steroids and happens to be the son of Satan… That’s different, right? The Doomguy is most likely exhausting all of his energy and willpower fighting these demons. 

The game's Nightmare difficulty portrays this far better; You are being bombarded with demons who want nothing but to kill you, and you are given almost zero room to breathe or make a mistake. When you finish the game, you feel like you did so just by the skin of your teeth, and that’s how it should feel when you’re playing as the underdog.

But that same level of difficulty wouldn't work with a game like Stardew Valley. A game that's supposed to be a relaxing and laid-back adventure that you can play to wind down from a long day of work or get over a hard time. Imagine if you had to worry about things like crop pests, fungus and overwatering your plants? Okay, all of those ideas do sound pretty cool… But what I’m trying to say is that games like Stardew Valley, Little Big Planet and Minecraft simply work better by being more forgiving and laid-back because that's the kind of feeling they’re trying to convey. 

Difficulty Should Have A Good Balance

God of War (Santa Monica Studio)

But back to my previous point — games should always have that balance between challenge and enjoyment. And most games just don't land that balance too well. Although how hard a game should be is subjective to the game in question, I think every game should have you use all the mechanics available to you in order to win.

And most games are simply not hard enough for players to need to do that. Take Mass Effect, for example; on the "Insanity" difficulty, you must use your abilities, your squadmates’ abilities and weapon upgrades. Your decision on what class you choose has to be a conscious one, and you will have to play to the strength of that class. You will have to do side missions to level up and not make going through the main story a nightmare. Not utilising everything at your disposal will most often guarantee a quick death. But on Normal difficulty, you can easily breeze through the whole game using just your weapons and some abilities here and there if you get bored of shooting people. Armour choices become more of a cosmetic decision than a tactical one, and you generally don’t have to care too much about where your upgrade points are going because the gameplay is so easy, anyway.

Sounds a lot less engaging, doesn't it?

On the other hand, there are games where playing on a higher difficulty can hinder your enjoyment; God of War, for example. 

Despite what I’m about to say, I think God of War is an amazing game, any game that wins Game of the Year has to be at least good in some people’s eyes; and I think that the gameplay is really engaging and enjoyable, and I still believe that the hardest difficulty – Give Me God of War – is the best way to experience this game… for the most part.  Although I can appreciate that you have to start utilising all of the combos and abilities at your disposal and that the ludonarrative dissonance is much less on this difficulty, the first few hours of the game are a miserable experience, mostly because you don’t yet have the abilities and items you need to make the combat fun. Runic attacks, special combos and abilities are locked off either by the progress of the story or by the skill tree. On top of that, all the enemies are bullet sponges… or Axe-sponges, I suppose? Regardless, it makes the earlier combat sections fights of endurance rather than skill. Dodging and blocking basic enemies isn’t hard, it’s just tedious, and the difficulty doesn’t come from how good your reflexes are, but rather how much of mashing R1 and pressing circle you can endure before you zone out. It’s simply not very fun.

 "And if it’s not fun, why bother?"

- Reggie Fils-Aimé

But, to the difficulty credit, it does make the boss fights far more engaging. Boss fights on the normal ‘Give Me A Challenge’ difficulty was often underwhelming, with the exception of the first fight with Baldur and the Valkyrie Queen. But the Baldur fight is more of a cinematic set piece than a proper boss fight, and the Valkyrie is literally the final boss of the entire game. Everything in between was hardly ever a challenge. In Give Me God of War, however, boss fights actually feel like boss fights, where all the skills you’ve learned thus far are pushed to their limits. One wrong move could be the deciding factor between victory and death. Yes, these can also become fights of endurance, and sometimes bosses do overstay their welcome, but boss fights should be a battle of endurance on top of everything else. The best kinds of boss fights are the ones where you feel a mix of relief, excitement and exhaustion because that’s exactly what the character you're playing as would be feeling. I don’t think, however, that you should be feeling exhausted after fighting a random enemy encounter, or else players are just going to start dreading anytime they go into combat.

I think what would have been a great difficulty for God of War would have been to make regular enemies have the same health they have in the normal difficulty, but for the player to take as much damage as they do in the hardest difficulty and bosses just remaining how they are in Give Me God of War. This would have made the regular encounters more engaging than Give Me A Challenge since you really couldn’t get hit, but less tedious than Give Me God of War since enemies had much less health.

Instead, what we were left with was a difficulty that was less tedious, but also less challenging, or a difficulty that was more challenging and often more rewarding but far more tedious and exhausting.  

Difficulty Modes Make Me Question My Experience

Bloodborne (FromSoftware)

But above all, my biggest gripe with difficulty modes is that I can’t decide which difficulty I should play on. “Should I play the game on normal, like the developers intended, or should I play it on hard and have an actual challenge?”

I won't have that sense of accomplishment if I play games on Normal, but when I'm playing a game on the hardest difficulty, and the time comes when I inevitably get to an area that is just straight-up BS! I have to either keep dying over and over or exploit the game – like with God of War. And I would ask myself, "If I had just picked the normal difficulty, this part wouldn't be so annoying”. This issue doesn’t exist with the Soulsborne games or any other game which doesn’t have difficulty modes, and I enjoy them all the more for it. I always know I am playing the way the developers intended, and I don't have to feel guilty about choosing a more convenient mode because there is no easy mode! 

But nevertheless, I understand the need for difficulty levels in games. Some people want the title credits to be earned, and others just want to enjoy an immersive story experience. And that’s fine, I don’t think every game should be difficult or easy. But I do think too many games are not being as engaging as they can be by either being too easy or too hard, but mostly too easy.