Game Difficulty

“Challenge” is not a inherent part of video games. Games can be toy-like, relaxing, simple, casual. Target demographic matters: It’s weird to complain that a game for children is child’s play. The hardware matters: It’s unfair to demand mouse-like precision when playing a console game. The design goals matter: Developers often rather have the players see end of a game. Challenge also cannot be separated from rest of the game design.: Some games are open-ended, focus on giving the player a lot of options. These games fundamentally rely on player agency, and have a hard time creating controlled environments for challenges, they are often more suited for self-imposed challenges. Nevertheless, a well-considered, tasteful level of difficulty can embolden core strengths of the gameplay, push the player out of their shell, and make them approach the game with a more sensitive eye that appreciates little nuances. It’s still good to have options however, because there is never a one-size-fits-all level of difficulty for everyone. There are also certain methods of difficulty that cause frustration more than not, and should best be left optional.

Medieval 2: Total War(2006) is dreadful to play on higher difficulties. All of your neighbors attack me on first opportunity, usually ignoring any other neighbors. When I try to play defensively and expand slowly, they will send armies over and over, there are times I have fought more than a dozen battles. It’s a most unwise way to play. The game isn’t unbeatable however, one just needs to play aggressively. The more aggressive, the better. The faster I conquer provinces, the more enemy becomes deprived from resources. I gain loot by capturing them and I get more taxes from new cities every turn, thus having even more armies to crush anything on my path. AI is completely helpless against this snowball effect. However, this isn’t too much fun either. This makes me too strong too early, and there is no time or need to use any sophisticated units. No guns, no heavy infantry, no elite archers. Just mercenaries, basic town units and general’s bodyguard can conquer the world. No need to any fun diversions like assassins, I can steamroll anyone before I can train one useful enough to kill a general. No need to care about religious mechanics or happiness in cities, I can just exterminate the population. No need to merchants, general traits, or most other mechanics. Even if I play recklessly and lose couple of cities, I can easily conquer more faster. The first time I did this, it was mildly enjoyable but the fact that I had to play like this every time made me soured any interest to play more in the future. Then, one day, I asked myself: “Why don’t I lower the difficulty?”. And I did. This made me finally remember why I liked the game so much once. I could play slow; develop large, bursting, happy cities and. build armies of elite soldiers. AI wasn’t obnoxiously aggressive and didn’t back-stab me in every chance. The game was pleasant, not stressful. I could play the way I wanted. I did not started any wars, merely retaliated, I released any prisoner I captured, never resorted the cruelty in conquered provinces. nurtured honorable and heroic generals. Diplomacy is bare bones in the game, but I still tried to keep my reputation as high as possible, because I could. I had so much fun when the game didn’t force me to optimize my behavior.

A common complaint about Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim(2011) is that the game is too easy, but such remarks hides the true grievances. There is a difficulty slider in the game, but the only thing it does is to punish the player for playing a magic-oriented build and make even the simplest encounter last 5 minutes. The game has difficult bosses, but the only real difference from easier ones is the amount of time they take to be defeated. As I have stated before, Skyrim is truly beautiful as a stroll in the forest. Whenever it tries to challenge however, it can only become a facsimile of better games. People don’t really complain that Skyrim is easy, they complain that it is a game that detests being hard. The fact that players and modders need to alter the gameplay so drastically to make the game even slightly challenging in the way most expect from similar games is a testament to the game’s inherent allergy towards difficulty.

In Trails of Cold Steel (began in 2013) series, the hardest difficulty "Nightmare" gives enemies more health and makes their attacks considerably more powerful. Protective abilities are costly and slow. Many bosses can heal themselves to full or make devastating attacks that pierce through any protective spell. If the characters are not fast enough, the enemies will get more turns and attack more. The only way to defeat the bosses is to be fast and strike hard as much as possible. Thankfully, the player can achieve really big combo attacks with correct builds. And, it works so well! The exhilarating rush of overwhelming the enemies with a well-planned chained of moves is superb, the game is able to create feeling of a flashy, bombastic arcade game within a turn-based combat system. Sure, it restricts the player options; as in one can’t approach the battles in the manner of classic RPG boss fights where the player slowly dwindles the enemy while trying to survive. This is perfectly fine, because the play style the game is pushing me is much more interesting. There are countless RPGs with “war of attrition” bosses. By punishing slow play, the game is able to guide the player into its unique and interesting features. And the beauty of difficulty options is such that, a player can always play on lower difficulties if it is too much for them. When it comes to linear gameplay, merely tweaking some numbers might be enough to make a game that’s just right for everyone.

A couple of difficulty modes can really enhance the game. I am bad at action games and when I saw Bioshock Infinite(2013)’s fast-paced, frantic gameplay, I knew I had to play the game on easy. And thankfully I did, it made the game quite tolerable overall, otherwise I cannot ever imagine tackling those sloppy gun-fights seriously. I like Starcraft(1998) quite a bit but, it’s Brood War expansion was way too brutal. There are no easy options, I am simply not good enough. And this is a inherent weakness of the games with unforgiving difficulty. A game won’t lose anything with having some cheats or a story mode. It will only win people who would otherwise give up on the game. Moreover, there is no reason to have the game resent the player for playing on easy. No locking main content behind harder difficulties, no fake endings, no mockery or passive-aggressiveness. Instead, it is much better to acknowledge and reward skillful play instead; with harder levels, enabling different ways of restrictions and so on. A game can’t and does not need to cater to everyone, but even a little seasoning can make it much more approachable to lots of people.

Beyond just different game modes, there are couple of noteworthy and, notorious patterns of difficulty I encounter in games:

Undoing huge amount of progress:

This is quite nasty. Old games did this a lot with limited lives, but the thing is, they were outdated even in Super Mario Brothers(1985). And that game was aware about this, it gave lots of extra lives and short-cuts so that players wouldn’t be too bothered by dying. I really like when games allow me to build to grow and be stronger, and don’t like when it demands me of re-take the challenges over and over to satisfy an arbitrary level of excellence. There is a case to be made about games with permanent death mechanic however. I am not too sure, because I have never played a game like that, but perhaps, because the game sets the player up for the end from the very beginning, it fosters a different kind of mentality than simply forcing them to making no mistakes. Otherwise, perfect runs can be offered as an optional mechanic.

Locking the ability to save:

I hate it, I really do. I should be able to save as much as I like, full stop. I don’t like checkpoints too, but I can tolerate them if they are numerous enough. This is the worst way to mess up with the player’s progress without openly trolling them. There is one fairly ubiquitous reason tampering with saves: To prevent “save-scumming”, in other words, loading old saves over and over to get a favorable outcome, as it usually bypasses the challenge to a certain degree. Here is my answer to this: Save-scumming is a response to faulty game design. It is usually not that fun. I would rather not do it, and I feel a lot of people wouldn’t too, but players don’t want to lose progress. Save-scumming happens either when something crucial is dependent on luck or the challenge is too demanding to take on at once. If the player is expected to embrace randomness, the feeling should be instilled very early on and the cost of failure shouldn’t be unbearable.

Europa Universalis 4(2013) is a game whose gameplay is heavily in the hands of fate. Battles, sieges and quite a few actions are influenced by dice, there are random events having positive or negative outcomes, there is at least a little randomness in almost every part of the game. Some of these random elements can be mitigated, a stronger country can weather more bad outcomes and, but even playing as a super-power, player is still sailing a boat on a raging ocean. And I get it, while it is frustrating sometimes, trying to recover from bad luck has its own charm. However, this completely turns on its head when trying to get difficult achievements. Now, not only I am only interested in optimal behavior, because of higher requirements or weaker starts I need to deal with, there is little room for failure. Obviously, for a “true challenge”, you are not allowed to load older saves during gameplay. Also obviously, I save-scum by quitting the game from desktop before it auto-saves. I am not going to risk hours of gameplay because of something random, ( or I misread the game’s not-ideal UI or it gave me wrong information or a glitch occurred or…) Randomness and perfection do not mix together.

Most games often do not have a graceful difficulty curve, there is usually that one place players fail again and again. And, it’s very understandable not to want to overtake a difficult challenge repeatedly just because of a single mistake. As I said before, demanding perfection can make players optimize themselves to boredom, and this is perhaps the most common way this happens. Again, having options help here. More tips, easier modes, cheats, perhaps allowing to skip levels are all better solutions than limiting saves. Besides the specifics of game design, the other solution is to avoid pushing players into perfection all together. Some games evaluate player’s performance at the end of the level. Missing a good score might be thing that pushes players into save-scumming. To prevent this, players shouldn’t feel like the game is screwed out of feeling complete. Giving player’s opportunities to recover from mistakes or dividing the challenge with checkpoints might convince players to keep going instead.

However tedious save-scumming might be, it’s always preferable to the anxiety of spending long stretches of time not being able to save. Some games try to be more experimental about save points, treating them as resources. for example. LISA: The Painful(2014) has one-time consumable save points, thankfully as an optional difficulty mode. Ori and the Blind Forest(2015) has limited saves, but the game is generous enough about them, and they actually serve to choose the re-spawn location. In most other cases, I don’t like deviations from convenience. This might seem narrow-minded, but I feel this is an issue beyond any issue in gameplay, it is a matter of fundamental user-friendly software design. Games are already time-consuming as they are, frankly they have no right to be so callous about player’s progress. There might be a troublesome glitch, a power outage, some sort of emergency, or player simply just wants to quit and continue later. I cannot ever see a justification of such entitlement to force players to play for an arbitrary about of time other than “People have adjusted themselves to a bad tradition.”. And as I said, I truly believe if save-scumming alone actually ruins the challenge of a game, that game’s design is truly flawed. Look at Trails in the Sky(2004), does it restrict saving and loading at all? No! Because, it’s a good game that is confident in it’s design.

Hiding Necessary Information

A boss turns out to be immune to the attack. The useless item from the beginning is maybe vital to get the best ending. Sometimes there is no map and there is no clue about what to do next. The intention is to give to player a sense of uncertainty and mystery. This can be used to great effect to make the player feel more adventurous, or heighten the sense of horror, but usually it just makes me to look up a guide. Game guides are fun, I love to learn about a game I enjoy as much as possible. and I even enjoy stumbling into secrets as much as anyone, but at the very least the game mechanics should be transparent as possible. Doing A yields B, getting X needs Y. I am not really sure what makes game devs so hesitant about this. Perhaps they are scared of their game looking too complex or maybe it’s assumed showing too many numbers break immersion in “cinematic experiences”? If the enemies in the game has level scaling for example, isn’t it much better to know that from the start? And surely it would be nice if player could make educated guesses about how their builds fare in the late game. Thankfully, at least as far as contemporary games are concerned, lack of information is never severe enough to stop players from soft-locking their game, but it’s still perplexing and occasionally frustrating that games are reluctant to explain themselves.

I love games which are honest about their challenges , rewards me for the progress I make and appreciate when they try to accommodate different levels of skill. I am also well aware that media is not produced tailor-made for me and respect games aiming for niche experiences, but I never look highly to games which are openly disregard user-convenience or accessibility to create challenges. Moreover, a game aiming for being difficult does not give it a blanket protection from criticism on it’s difficulty. One can desire a good challenge and can still find what’s offered overwhelming, tedious, or unfair. It’s always better to have an honest discussion on design instead of mocking people for playing badly. No one has to be good at the games and super majority of games are intended to be beaten, most anyone can beat a game if they put the work on it, but sometimes people just don’t feel it’s worth their time.

This article is written thanks to my dearest Patrons and special thanks to: Acelin, Laura Watson, , Makkovar, MasterofCubes, Morgan, Otakundead and Spencer Gill.

Graphics

n late 2000s and in 2010s, video game graphics have matured tremendously. It has become a rare instance where a professionally developed (regardless of the budget) game is truly off putting to large groups of people. There are easy to access tools to make expressive, appealing visuals for your games; certain quality standards has become more and more accepted. And of course, graphics had always a lower priority compared to a captivating gameplay. When a game is popular on PC for years and years, there is a good chance it's partly due to how friendly the game is to older systems. The enormous triumph of Gameboy and Wii owes to their low graphical capabilites. People still cherish old games, despite, and sometimes because of their old-fashioned graphics. As the average hardware has reached a certaim threshold of power, the limitations to making a game visually presentable has been largely eroded, as a result, computer graphics have surpassed merely being tolerable. Today, they are quite alright, even in the most humble smartphones.
This is an overwhelmingly positive progress, but there is a concerning side effect. Graphics, and visuals as whole has lost some spark. Even game magazines, despite how hyped up they usually are, had lost some of their excitement on this issue over the years. Tech-driven hype, at least on non-VR, non-3D side, has lost steam; due to simply how we perceive visuals: There is an incredible difference in rendering an object with polygons vs 200 polygons, 300 polygons vs 1000 polygons... but 10000 polygons vs 20000 polygons? 30000 polygons? 50000? After a certain count it starts to give diminishing returns. However, I wouldn't say this is the only reason. Rather, I would argue that, in the process of standardization, the industry as a whole actively made visuals less interesting, ironically while trying to chase the glory of the early 2000s. But.. why? For this, let's discuss a game where visuals make me really excited:

Ori the Blind Forest(2015) is a gorgeous game. A screenshot from any moment of the game is worthy of a physical frame on the wall. From color composition, careful management of lightning and shadows, great cohesion in character designs, background and user interface to the tiniest details in the pixels; the game is filled with awe and wonder, but with a kind that wants to feel the player welcome rather than being overwhelmed. Not only that, it brims with life: The dim lights on the lab,  Ori's own movements, how the game communicates the weather and the mood of the scene with the most subtle changes. One could say that the game is like being in an animated movie, but this is quite an understatement. Rather, it's as if player themselves is directing the animations, creating a whole alternate reality from drawings.
The feelings the visuals achieve to create do not entirely come from images alone. The controls, the sounds, the level design all play the same rhythm with the visuals. The game's difficulty for instance, is just right enough so that, a player can both linger enough in a level enough and savor the visuals for quite a while, but also make the player master the controls so that they can gradually learn to go blazing fast and dominate the landscape. When Ori takes a hit, its brief "ah!" and seconds of flashing red on its body both communicate the pain clearly without being disturbing, telegraph the invincibility frames and show how adorable Ori is at the same time. Many more examples can be given, but it can be seen that the graphics of the game are not just concened with presentation, they are baked in the language of the game. This is what makes the graphics in Ori the Blind Forest truly special, beyond just high fidelity and eye-candy effect.
Games often build a degree connection between their visuals and rest of the game as they develops naturally, but in some cases, it seems that the direction of visuals is actively towards abstracting this connection. Blizzard games certainly feel like this for example. Beginning with Warcraft 3(2002), all of their games started to share an art direction of easy-to-eyes, vibrant, expressive in-game graphics that don't lose too much quality on old system, coupled with highly detailed and photorealistic cutscenes with a slight cartoony streak which again, saves them from being dated. It is a very succesful style; very easy to make it distinct, appealing, and to maintain compared to pure photorealism, easily surpass most low-budgeted cartoony styles in polish, creates an easily distinguishable brand without needing to be unique, and adaptable to nearly anything. It is too successful for it's own good, it feels like a pretty package for the game, doesn't really add to it; negative or positively. Despite all of its glitter, the art direction in those games is lackluster when it comes to conveying emotion and character on its own, instead either relying on widely recognizable visual tropes or dazzling the players with excessive detail in cutscenes. Blizzard visuals always impress me for a short while, then it makes me feel there is something missing, a thing that a game like Bloodborne(2015), Celeste(2018) or even a game like Super Meat Boy(2010) has.
Isn't this at least a little vain? Seasoned programmers and artists working hundreds of hours with the most proffesional equipment, creating software for computers with the most powerful graphical processing unit and copious amount of memory space, so that we can see the our protagonist'sbody hair waving in the wind in our video game. A huge achievement for the research field, but in practice, all it achieves is to mildly impress people in trailers and have the same function as the graphics of Fortnite(2017), filling the basic duties of visuals, and carry little personality of their own. And among visual styles, photorealism perhaps has been misused the most this way.
a close up beard shot from Uncharted 4[/caption]First, let's establish what 'photorealism' is. It is not just when a game tries to be life-like. A game can be realistic, i.e. visual objects can feel like they have a tangible existence. However a gameWs art direction can be both realistic and stylized. For instance, Gone Home(2013) is rather down to earth with it is visuals, but has a cartoony feel that is not concerned too much with fidelity. Photorealism however, takes being "real" to its conclusion, its aim is to look like a as if recorded in a camera in a real life, a scene from the game looking like a photograph or a moment from a live-action movie. Looking realistic was a goal for video game graphics as old as graphics themselves, but photorealism only became feasible after technology has been developed to a certain point. Though there are earlier attempts of photorealism, notably with Full Motion Videos, it really became a thing in late 2000s when games slowly figured out how to look realistic in close detail without drenching themselves in brown. Then it evolved to its point of today, where we can savor the player character's body hair, every milimeter of dirt on their armor, the smallest detail on the guns with their full glory.
What does this exactly achieve? Well, it can put them ahead in competition, provides a good justification for sequels, looks cool in trailers, gives an incentive for updating game systems, serves as tech demos. What about the game itself? Despite how strict and demanding the style is,  it is often treated as default for a big action game, with actual questionable improvement of the game's experience. As much as I have criticized Blizzard graphics, they are at least indeed pleasant-looking and recognizable. Photorealism is not only at the mercy of the hardware but also it can only look nice and impressive as the scenes it is imitating from real life. A water stream, a garden, sun rising behind mountains can be made truly awesome, but muddy soliders or gray apartment blocks? What does being able to see every little detail provides us?  A game can have a gritty, broody or scary tone without photorealism. Telltale Walking Dead(2013-2019) games are serious and filled with gore as they can be without being over-the-top, yet they are cel-shaded, and this allows the games to depict visuals as detailed as they need while being cost effective and being able to have more control over the visual tone.
What does photorealism truly achieves is have precious moments from the game that truly looks like movies. A real oportunity for the PRESTIGE. Look at Last of Us(2013), Red Dead Redemption 2(2019) or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare(2019), how truly GREAT they are. I am not entirely ironic here, such games have truly impressive moments. However, those moments are fleeting; because in the end, a game not trying to look like a game is a desperate fight against itself, only in brief shots and cutscenes I get to have that "wow" effect. This creates a conflict between the gameplay and the visuals, and it's usually what this makes such graphics actually off-putting to me. The fact that gameplay systems did not have a drastic change over the years only excerbates this: One second there is a cutscene with faces with perfect motion capture, on the other there is an enemy who absorbs very real-looking bullets from a very real-looking gun like a sponge, barely even twitching its very real-looking body. Same guns, same covers, same skill trees, same stealth, same level design; all at least near two decades old.  Those gameplay systems were designed with the graphics of it's day. FPS pioneers were maze games, jumping became more pronounced in those games as 3D spaces expended vertically.  Then, as the graphic power increased, the gameplay become slower and in more cramped spaces to show show the objects in detail. But towards mid 2000s,  the gameplay systems which proved their merit just reused again and again while graphics evolved. That is perfectly fine in itself, but photorealism does not forgive such stagnation. Red Dead Redempton 2 goes extra mile to make everything "naturalistic" as possible, but because it conflicts with the fundemental game systems underneath, it can feel even more artificial at times.
All that being said, photorealism is just a style, and can be used well. Until Dawn(2015) is an apt example. The game goes out of its way to mimic horror movies. Its limited interaction helps to maintain the movie-like feel, photorealistic visuals feel meaningful and build the identity of the gaöe. The appeal of racing games often comes from the extreme detail on the cars coupled with precise physics engines, they exist to be car porns. However debatable its success is, L.A. Noire(2011) at least tries to use its motion capture technology in the gameplay. All of these examples prove that truly good visuals are the ones in harmony with other elements of the game.
Graphics matter. They posses an incredible power to shape our games., both for good and bad. And so much effort goes into creating them, they are major reason for crunches, bloating budgets, delays, two-digit gigabyte patches. Graphics don't have to be amazing, some games don't have any graphics at all, but if we are putting so much effort into them, They deserve better than to be "fine" with occasional "screenshot-worthy" moments. The technology we have can be much more than just more blood for the altar of marketing, it can provide us with truly special experiences, like Ori.
This article is written thanks to my dearest Patrons and special thanks to: Acelin, Alexandra Morgan, Laura Watson, MasterofCubes, Makkovar, Otakundead and Spencer Gill.